Mirror coating services are a major part of our heritage here at North American Coating Laboratories. When we began our business, we deposited mirror coatings, but they were all for cosmetic purposes on ophthalmic lenses. As times changed and we began to move into more non ophthalmic related applications our mirrors were used more for functional applications than fashion applications.
The interesting element of these applications is that the deposition technology is the same and creates a mirror that aesthetically looks the same. This is the case with our Full Mirror Gold coating and our Protected Gold coatings. Full Mirror Gold looks great poolside on a pair of sunglasses and Protected Gold helps shield astronauts and fighter jet pilot’s eyes from the extreme exposure of infrared light from the sun.
We achieve the cosmetic appearance of Full Mirror Gold by depositing a precise amount of dielectric materials to achieve the brilliant gold mirror appearance. For Protected Gold we deposit a precise amount of elemental gold (Au) to a substrate which allows for light transmission but also reflection of harmful IR wavelengths which can negatively effect or blind people operating in direct intense sunlight.
These instances where the heritage of NACL meets with the present are always exciting to us as we work on a daily basis serving our customers in both the ophthalmic and industrial fields.