ReevesExtruded
Lighting Diffusers And Lenses
Mono-Extrusion Shapes
Co-Extrusion
Skim Coating
Bending
Shapes / Profiles
Colors
Blending
Regrind
Compounds
Acrylic
Polycarbonate
We’ve specialized in LED lighting diffusers and lenses for over 20 years. We have four types of extrusion processes:
- Mono: Only one compound per profile
- Co-extrusion: Two compounds per profile
- Skim Coating: Eliminates the need for sandblasting
- Bending: We can bend certain lens designs with a minimum of a 14-inch radius
Shapes / Profiles
We run several hundred different profiles each year. In general, we can run:
- Mono and coextrusion
- Width: Up to 24 inches
- Thickness: 0.020 inches to more than 0.250 inches
- Length: Typically range from 0.25 inches to 25 feet, though we’ve run longer pieces.
- Common Shapes / Profiles
- Fresnel lenses
- Prismatic Lenses
- Batwings
- Tubes
- Squares
- Collimators
- C-Channels
- Asymmetric flow, such as a thick lens and thin legs
- Tubes
- With 50 years of experience, we’ve figured out how to minimize die lines and keep the walls consistent which will help your tube glow without shadows
- We have in-house tooling to go from 0.50” to 8.00” OD.
Colors
- We can add color or buy pre-colored material to hit your color targets
- We frequently match pantone and RAL colors
- We’ve also developed proprietary colors that help improve performance, including:
- Reeves White: Gives the lens a nice white glow when the LEDs are on and off. There’s no premium for this white, we just want you to have a nice lens.
- Highly Reflective White (“HRW”): Highly Reflective White is 95% reflective and typically co-extruded in the legs of the lens. In addition to adding about 5% more light transmission depending on lens design, it will help restore light transmission when adding color, help eliminate shadows in corners or where legs intersect the lens, and make the lens appear whiter when the light is off.
- Diffuse White: This helps reduce dark areas on the corners of thick profiles, or where the lens expands past the legs
- Blackout: Black when the light is off, but glows white when the light is on. For use in signage or hiding fixtures in the background.
Blending
- We custom blend colors and compounds to achieve your light transmission and diffusion targets
- We precisely measure compounds and color to create batches of material. The precision allows us to achieve the same profile performance for each order
- We thoroughly mix the batches to ensure consistency
Regrind
- We don’t use regrind in our lenses. Many extruders will reuse regrind to help save costs, but regrind introduces impurities into the lens and variability on performance extrusions because we believe in playing our part in preserving our environment. We just use it in our other product lines.
Compounds
Acrylic
Most frequently used in LED lenses due to clarity and performance
Types
- Clear – Used in optical and Fresnel lenses.
- Frosted – Used to help hide the hot spots from LED diodes. Our frosted materials also have similar light transmission to clear acrylic, but have a textured, matte finish.
- Diffuse – Similar to frosted, but with a smooth texture. Diffuse can help hide diodes better than frosted, but can significantly decrease light transmission.
- Impact modified – Impact modified acrylic helps make the lens more flexible, which is important when snapping into the aluminum frame. Impact modified also helps prevent cracking and splintering overtime in outside applications. Impact modified acrylics are available in clear, frosted and diffuse grades.
Polycarbonate
- Optical grade for clarity
- Polycarbonate is much harder than acrylic, but can yellow over time especially in outside conditions
- We have several diffusion options we can blend with polycarbonate to help achieve light transmission and hiding power