Quote:
Originally Posted by Profiler
I can help with this mystery as I had the audacity to ask exactly this same question and got my answer straight from the horses mouth - the good folks in the Bintel store Sydney.
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Nope you didn't get it straight from the horses mouth. The horses mouth is 16,000km from Bintel, in Chester New York.
I got it straight from the horses mouth
I asked Al Nagler this exact question while chatting with him at the 2007 Texas Star Party
He said he used two manufacturers as a safeguard for contingencies. The recent Tsunami in Japan showed how smart a business strategy this might be. Al mentioned the Taiwan factory had slightly better tooling to make the physically larger eyepieces, eg. T4's,T5's and Panoptics. This is the reason the physically smaller eyepieces; the Nagler T6's, Radians and TV Plossls, are manufactured in Japan and the larger eyepieces like the Nagler T4's, T5's, Panoptics and ETHOS are manufactured in Taiwan. Al specifically mentioned there was no difference in manufacturing quality bewtween the Japanese and Taiwanese plants and that every eyepiece manufactured went through personal inspection and quality control at the Televue plant in New York and each manufacturer had a similar and very low rejection rate. Al also mentioned that in the event of a problem with one of the plants, the other plant could easily manufacture all of the eyepieces produced by Televue so supply would be unaffected.
I quickly figured that Al Nagler was not only a great optical designer but a very smart businessman.
Cheers,
John B