I have not written many reviews on this blog. I’m working on a full video review of a piece of optical lab equipment, but this is time consuming. In advance of completing a full scale video, I thought it might be of interest to provide some of the text from that review. If someone reads this blog, they might get some useful information about this equipment. So, here we go.
Folks doing optics in the lab often get to use a large breadboard or optical bench with a repetitive hole pattern on the top. That’s fine if you are lucky enough to have one of those benches. In some situations, you might not have access to such a breadboard. You may wish to obtain a small breadboard for experimental or tooling purposes. We will discuss a component which we found to be very useful for those situations where a large optical breadboard or bench is not needed or is just not available for our use.
This equipment is available from Base Lab Tools Inc., a company located in Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania. They are a USA based company specializing in optical breadboards, opto-mechanics, and other products for the optics lab and manufacturing market. For the sake of full disclosure, we have no special connection with this company, other than simply a retail customer. Base Lab Tools did not provide this part for a review; we purchased it at normal retail price. They have a website, from which parts can be ordered. The product we discuss is their model SAB0612-D aluminum optical breadboard. It is 12″ long, 6″ wide, and is 1/2″ thick. It’s blackened on all surfaces and has rounded corners for easy handling. It is a double-density type of board with 1/4-20 tapped through holes on a 1″ spaced grid, but it also has a second grid of 1/4-20 tapped through holes spaced at 1″, but which is offset by 1/2″ from the first set of holes. (This is a common layout for tapped holes and other vendors use it as well.) You can see this layout on their website. I just looked up their website and they are doing business; see http://www.baselabtools(dot)com.
Before continuing with a review, we will comment that it is understandable that this optical breadboard is fairly small, compared with large table-based breadboards used in industry; yes we get that! So if you need a “large” work surface, whatever that may be, then this item may not be what you need. This plate can also be used in connection with a large optical table.
The hole arrangement on the 12″ x 6″ breadboard provides a total of 127 through holes in the plate. Of these holes, 122 are tapped with 1/4-20 threads, while five (5) of them are counter-bored clearance holes for 1/4″ screws for purposes of mounting this breadboard on another plate or on some sort of feet. One of these holes is located near each corner, and one in the center of the plate. Of course you can always drill and counter-bore more of these holes if you need additional clearance holes. We weighed this plate on an analog scale, and got a weight of three pounds and four ounces (3 lb 4 oz). That is clearly light in weight and easy to handle or adjust on another surface. If you needed to adjust it to be level, this should be an easy task due to its light weight.
It is advertised as made in the USA. When we ordered this breadboard from Base Lab Tools in 2022, the retail price we paid was $122, which we consider to be relatively inexpensive for this component. Your opinion regarding cost will depend upon your budget.
We find that this breadboard with the double density hole pattern is very useful for small tooling jobs or experimental setups, when you do not require a long optical path or a large surface area to work on. The only downside you might observe is that it is a solid aluminum plate, only 1/2″ thick, and it does not have a honeycomb structure to provide reduction in vibration or mechanical resonance. Honeycomb type optical benches are wonderful but they tend to be expensive. But this is useful for many purposes, and if you can allow a short time for vibrations or a resonance to dampen out, then it can serve well.
As it is only 1/2″ thick, which is thinner than most expensive optical breadboard benches which have a honeycomb structure beneath the surface plate, you need to use short screws to attach components to the top, so they will not protrude below the bottom surface. You can mount this breadboard on feet or spacers if you wish to allow for longer screws to protrude through the plate, or if you need to mount any components on the bottom surface of the plate. Both of the surfaces of the plate are pretty smooth. We did not do specific testing on surface flatness of this plate.
If you need mild vibration isolation using this breadboard, you can try using the vibration isolating pads which are made for use with astronomical telescopes, which usually are placed under three tripod legs. These are available from retail vendors who sell telescopes and tripods. These might help. Of course, if your work requires interferometry, you will need to use some serious vibration isolation techniques.
We used this breadboard plate for some simple optical experiments. The 1/4-20 threaded through holes in their double density pattern allow one to attach opto-mechanical components via 1/4-20 screws in ways that allow these parts to be located relatively close to each other, if that is what you need. Your experimental or tooling projects could of course be very diverse from ours.
In one simple example the SAB0612-D optical breadboard allowed us to support a Newport model VPH-2 (2″) No-Slip post holder and a steel post holding a Newport M-PPF50 spring loaded Filter Mount. In this case, that Filter Mount was offset from the post by using a short aluminum piece cut from a Newport Construction Rail. The post holder has a 1/4-20 hole in its base for mounting. We used a 1/4-20 stud to mount it to the breadboard to eliminate a screw protruding from the bottom. The assembly supported by a post allowed us to rotate the Filter Mount to set any arbitrary angle in azimuth orientation. We also used it to support a flat mirror in a tip-tilt adjuster mount. Obviously these were simple examples of an application.
One could mount this breadboard on another stable surface for doing optical testing or alignment tasks on small optical systems. It seems to lend itself to lab setups of optics which would fit within its surface area, i.e. 12″ x 6″. We measured the distance between the centers of the tapped holes at each edge of the plate, for the length and width, with a K&E Paragon draftsman’s ruler. For these dimensions we got (approx.) 11″ for the long dimension and 5″ for the narrower dimension. The linear hole-to-hole spacing is one inch. This indicates how you could easily fit equipment on one surface. It’s also possible to mount two of these breadboard plates parallel to each other with spacers, which then gives you four flat surfaces on which to mount equipment.
We have working experience making tooling in an optical manufacturing facility, so we evaluated this breadboard plate from the point of view of tooling applications. It was our opinion that this product would be quite useful for various tooling purposes, especially because it is small and not heavy. As it is made from aluminum, it is stiff, light weight, easy to machine, and non-ferro-magnetic. It should be good for assembly tooling and testing applications.
We hope this information will be useful to some readers who could use a small optical breadboard.
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