Profit margins on goggles

[Deleted member 10578]

I guess that sums up the entire issue with certification.

Also, just selling something as certified increases the price, since the vendor will be liable when the product malfunctions. If someone ends up blind due to some defect, this will be a pretty expensive ordeal, and corporate insurance premiums reflect those risks.

I'm not totally sure what the expected lifetime of safety glasses is, but i can imagine it is decades. So for every pair of certified goggles sold, there are decades of potential liability for the vendor.

I'd be interested to see how much of the price of a certified pair is actually insurance - i wouldnt be surprised if this is the majority of the product cost.

Frothy hit the nail right on the head.
As far as product liability and lawsuits go, good luck suing any company in China for anything; it just isn't possible. So they can promote or promise anything they like about a product.

 

[Benm]

Thats probably large part of the safety game. In a corporate environment you need to take measures for workers security and therefor have no choice buying certified goggles, regardless of cost.

There is not always a difference in quality between certified and non-certified products though. The latter can be identical from the same factory line but without the certification at half the cost. This may sound insane, but it is actually very common with some products such as electronic components. The 'standard' variety often carries a notice in the datasheet that it is not to be used in life support or other critial operations. You can buy the exact same component that is certified as suitable for such application at a premium price, which gives you the right to go after the manufacturer if you sustain great damages as a result of the component failing while operated in spec.

These premiums can be enormous too: many manufacturers will require you to specify the intended use and produce a price for the certified part. Depending on your plans this could easily bump the price of a $0.1 opamp to $100.

 

[sdistin]

What equipment do you have to test these "homemade Safety
Goggles" in the wavelengths that are needed... say from 300nm
to 1200nm... and from 100mW to 2Watts...:thinking:

Jerry

Though I haven't put much thought into developing a method, I have access to a few spectrometers. An Agilent UV/Vis with a tungsten deuterium source and photodiode array detector good for 300-800nm. A Thermo FT-IR which I don't know the wavelength (or wavenumber) range offhand. Probably the most promising though, are several Ocean Optics specs which can be used with their own sources or can be detached and conected to a laptop or Verneir lab quest.

I anticipate a couple difficulties: compairing the tranmittance to the orriginal intensity without blowing up my detector if I use a laser as a source, and if I use the W-Deuterium lamp as a source, accounting for the higher energies of a laser compared to a lamp. Somone with better knowledge of laser optics might be able to tell me how much that would affect %T.