Coating Unit, Assisted by AccuCoat, Installed in Rochester High School

Thin-film optical coating provider AccuCoat Inc. has assisted a local high school in obtaining its own coating unit.

Sixty students per semester at East High School in Rochester will now reap the benefits of understanding mirror and anti-reflection coatings, as well as continuing to hone their polishing and coring skills and generating curves on optical components.

East High student loading and unloading glass from coater. Courtesy of AccuCoat Inc.

Instructor Paul Conrow, a chemist by training, was assisted by AccuCoat to source, restore, calibrate and deliver the refurbished Denton coater and fixturing to his class, with a New York State grant to fund the purchase. The restoration and installation time was donated by the AccuCoat technical team.

“AccuCoat has been phenomenally welcoming, and has gone out of its way to make their facility available to the class,” Conrow said. “Keeping a diverse group of kids interested in learning this process is part of the daily challenge and having the coater in the classroom itself is a huge help. Having a tangible, useful outcome of a coating run is key.”

AccuCoat has been coating on polymer, glass, crystal and metal optics to military grade specifications for manufacturing and R&D groups around the globe.

“One of ways that Rochester will continue to succeed in the optics world, is the addition of East’s graduates into the mix. We are pleased to have been able to facilitate the use of this coater for the Precision Optics program,” said co-founder of AccuCoat, Paul Meier-Wang. “East High currently has a precision optics manufacturing lab that no high school in the nation has. We look forward to seeing its graduates in the local optics and photonics companies.”