Introduction and questions about my new Edger

[mattschwartz]

Hello everyone,

Let me start by saying that I am not an optometrist, nor do I pretend to be. I started a company that sells reading glasses that feature interchangeable lenses. This lets people switch between reading lenses and sunglasses lenses easily. We do not intend for these to replace Rx glasses or any eye health exams.

Well, now that we got that out of the way, how's everyone doing?

We're a small company and we're about to start selling at a location at a local mall. Since we're pretty small scale and our retail price is pretty low, we figured that we would edge our lenses ourselves, so I bought some extremely cheap lab equipment. The edger I got is a National Optronics Horizon ii. All of my research indicates that this machine is a workhorse and when it's working well, not much goes wrong. Yes, it is patterned, but this is a good thing for us right now since we only have 2 frames designed (so only 2 patterns). One day I'd love a patternless, but we're not doing a large variety of frames right now.

I've used newer patternless edgers, however not something this vintage (I do love vintage machinery however). Does anyone have any experience with this machine and could you offer some insight? It all seems somewhat straight forward but I'm still a newbie so I don't want to mess anything up! At the moment I'm trying to figure out what this vacuum situation is.

Looking forward to conversing with some of you soon.

Thanks,
Matt

[Speed]

Keep the blades sharp. You may want to use diamond blades. I would.

[mattschwartz]

Where could I go about acquiring these diamond blades?

[Plausible]

Where could I go about acquiring these diamond blades?

Direct through National Optronics.

[mattschwartz]

I see. I'll shoot them an email.

Does anyone have any old patterns that they're not using anymore? We want to do some testing with the machine and we don't have our patterns finished yet. I'll pay for shipping!