Machining metal has its challenges, but machining glass is another matter—one that Dan Bukaty Jr., president of Precision Glass & Optics (PG&O) is well schooled in. Bukaty and his 35 person shop manufacture high-end precision glass optics for customers such as IMAX, Intuitive Surgical, Boeing and NASA, to name a few. The products PG&O makes can range from the ordinary to the extraterrestrial, such as mirrors that it fabricated for the Hobby–Eberly Telescope to measure dark energy in outer space.
Operating in an 18,000 sq. ft. build-to-print optical fabrication facility in Santa Ana, CA, approximately 80% of the products PG&O manufactures are termed “windows,” in that light travels through them. Used for thousands of applications, they are sold worldwide to optical catalog companies or in industries such as defense, biomedical, automotive, digital cinema and more.