Machined Plastic Housing Material.

Would you consider plating?

No, certainly not with anything metallic. Some of our devices switch on & off fast as part of their use, we quote gating times down into the ps range. One of the labs using these found that having an insulator with a metallic skin or metal with an insulating skin (anodised) makes the housing act like an antenna & transmits these fast, high voltage pulses.

Plastic parts are painted by the millions every day.

Many plastic cases used today for consumer products are painted because molded colors are not consistent batch to batch.

EMI coatings are applied all the time, to the interiors of many, many packages to reduces interference.

Contact a paint supplier. Du Pont, Dow Chemical and others can help you.

A material change may be in order for better adhesion.

<plating a single part may be expensive, but certainly would work, again maybe with another material. Plating is not straight forward, as a conductive layer is required for most metals>

Paint is a possibility.

Teflon? Machinable ceramics?

Just wondering here, but if the housing charges up, does the charge buildup affect the intensifier somewhat?

Also, if these are used in-vacuo, charge buildup on dielectrics can reach very high levels, potentially high enough to cause dielectric breakdown.

If charge accumulation is a problem, you can treat the surface with antistatic coatings so long as you provide a low-impedance discharge path.

Alternatively, mount your existing assembly in a metal can? A lot depends on your product's application.

Have there been complaints about the appearance? I reckon most end-users of intensifiers (especially) are more concerned that the product meets specs than in what it looks like. In most apps only the window is visible. It's not like you're selling cars. "Do you have anything in Opal Blue?"

Well we got yer light grey, yer medium grey, and yer non-reflective grey medium.....

I sense that a solution is nigh.

The charging of the case (or rather the discharging) causes flashes in the tube output.

There have not been specific complaints, it's more our feeling that if someone pays several thousand for a small device, it should look the part.

Check out vapour polishing.

Acrylic and polycarbonate, mainly. Can the housing be transparent or must it be opaque to block light? If it can be transparent, polycarbonate (Lexan) would not only look sharp but would facilitate inspection without taking the intensifier out of the housing.

Nigh, does your company make the actual intensifier element? If so, does it use a microchannel plate? I used these in ultra-sensitive ion detectors for mass spectrometers, to examine broad swaths of spectra at a time. This allowed us to work with samples as small as 20 femto-moles (these can make a mess of your yard because they're so damned hard to see ). 20 fMol is roughly the amount of 'stuff' that sticks to the outside of a mosquito's snout after it sticks you.

We've used vapor blasting on metal parts, I'll look into vapour polishing.

It needs to be opaque to prevent stray light getting in.

Yes we do make the intensifiers & most of them use MCPs although we are developing alternatives. We've had trouble with moles here as well although I'm sure they were bigger, black & furry as well.

Look at ABS. Has higher impact resistance, higher dielectric strength and can be polished to a luster.

This sounds like a 3d printer would be quite helpful to you. ABS can be polished

That has crossed my mind, I'd like an excuse to buy one now that the prices are reasonable. We'd need 0.1mm resolution which excludes some of the very cheap machines but would not need a large footprint. I've looked at the vapour polishing mentioned in a previous post & this seems to work well with ABS which is commonly used by the printers. My only other worry is that we use thin wall sections which could de-laminate.