Base Lab Tools offers a unique optical breadboard and tables manufacturing abilities that cannot be found anywhere else.

Our honeycomb optical tables and optical breadboards are designed using an aluminum honeycomb core with a smaller cell size to maximize contact between the skins and core eliminating the delamination problems found in other designs. Starting with the all aluminum light weight honeycomb core, 3/16 in (5mm) thick skins are added with the desired hole pattern producing an incredibly rigid and light structure. Unlike heavy steel honeycomb tables and breadboards, our optical tables and optical breadboards are extremely rigid, light and rust free. We typically coat the honeycomb optical breadboard and optical table skins with a black laser safe coating but also can provide an uncoated, white clean-room coating, or black anodized finish.

In customized version of our optical tables and breadboards, we have provided through ports of all sizes, custom shapes, counter bore mounting holes, alpha numeric engraving, special coatings and custom core thicknesses

For our solid aluminum breadboards, we can do thicknesses up to 2" (50 mm) and plates as large as 60" x 96" (1.5 m x 2.4 m) making Base Lab Tools the only manufacturer of solid aluminum breadboards in the world offering such large solid aluminum breadboards from stock as well as custom. Beyond this, Base Lab Tools has the ability to manufacture almost any custom solid aluminum optical breadboard within 2 weeks. In fact more than 98% of our custom solid aluminum breadboard orders go out in less than 2 weeks, made in our US manufacturing facility and at a lower cost than other custom breadboard manufacturers. We can make this happen because optical breadboards and optical tables are our main business, not a side business as with so many large photonics catalog companies.

How do I choose whether I need a solid aluminum or honeycomb core optical breadboard? It all has to do with rigidity. The rule of thumb is that the thicker the breadboard, the more ridged (less deflection for a given weight). As an example, here is a sided by side test of a 1/2" (13mm) aluminum breadboard (SAB2424) compared to a 3/4" (19mm) solid aluminum breadboard (SAB2424-T) compared to a 2" (50mm) aluminum honeycomb core breadboard with aluminum skins (BB2424-A-2).