Howdy! Long time lurker, first time poster. In the last 4 months I've taken over the surfacing manager role. Come from a background of final QC.

I'm tackling a lot of issues regarding best practices. Established "best practices" in this lab under previous management unfortunately err'd a little too much on the side of "close enough" for my tastes, and one of them is on our minus base curve lenses. I'm seeing significant first surface deformation on our minus base lenses. The SOP that has existed has been to adjust the tooling numbers in our generators to compensate. Clearly this is horrendously wrong and I immediately put a stop to it.

We have a small collection of Precision Tool Technologies' cataract blocks for high plus lenses. Notches were cut out of them as a fill point for use in our LOH PRAs. There's a TON of alloy in there and the first surface deformation is readily apparent to me just on visual inspection alone. These jobs were only ever QC'd by the previous surfacing manager and never made it to my desk in my previous role as I'd have immediately rejected them. Generating as calc'd results in a slightly off-power lens so operators have been trained to adjust the tooling to compensate.

In the mess I've adopted I've found a whole collection of Precision Tool's color coded "perfect power" blocks. I cannot for the life of me determine how they are to be used with the PRA system when the blocking ring does not contact the lens surface. Can anyone advise on how these should be used in conjunction with the PRA system?

So far I have personally been using the unmodified cataract blocks and filling them by hand very slowly in a cool water bath to reduce alloy contraction as much as possible. This has completely eliminated the distortions, and the resulting lenses nuetralize exactly where they should, no more of this "its within ANSII, send it" non-sense. However doing this is tedious and a waste of 20 minutes of my day to block only 4-5 jobs.

Thanks!