ABOUT THORION

Welcome! I see you've found your way to Thorion Optics. You're probably wondering who I am.

My name is Nathan. I build night vision devices out of north Texas. Mostly PVS-14s, hand-assembled one at a time. You need something? I'll get it to you.

My first piece of night vision was a Gen 1 Night Owl I bought for $80 as a broke kid. It was terrible. But it worked, and from that point on I was hooked.

Getting from Gen 1 to anything real was the hard part. Analog night vision is expensive, and dealer pricing puts serious builds well out of reach for most people. If you didn't have a few grand to drop, the answer from the community was usually some flavor of "kick rocks until you do."

So I went digital first. I built a $300 monocular out of a 3D-printed housing, a drone camera, and an LCD screen. Not an analog tube, but it taught me the optical chain. How to source components, how to assemble something that works, and the satisfaction of hearing that "whirr" as it powers on for the first time. From there I started learning the analog side. Sourcing tubes, fitting housings, collimating glass, repairing what came in damaged. That's how Thorion Optics started.

The first unit I ever sold was a blemished Omni 8 PVS-14. I found the tube as a depot pull. Visible blems, but underlying specs were Omni 8 minimums or higher. I sourced a used milspec housing, new objective and eyepiece glass, and a sweet little carry pouch to go with it. Built the whole thing on the bench and posted it to a forum marketplace:

Crickets. Then interest? Then a buyer appeared. He was new to night vision, and looking for something he could actually use. It was his first analog unit, and at $1,350 it was a real entry point that wouldn't have existed at dealer pricing.

That's not to say everything went without bumps and rough patches. When the tube first arrived, I found that the pigtail (gain connecting wire) had a bent pin from rough handling somewhere in its previous life. I repaired it, confirmed everything was working, and wired it into the housing.

That whole exchange convinced me this should be a real workshop and not just a hobby. Sourcing the tube. Finding the bent pin. Repairing it. Talking to the buyer about what he was seeing for the first time. There are people who want to see in the dark and can't justify $4,000 to do it. I can build for them.

There's a real superiority problem in the NV community. People who have spent $5,500 or more on a single set treat anything below that tier with open contempt. If your tube doesn't have a top-shelf data sheet, the response is some version of "why did you even buy that." Beginners asking questions get pointed back to the same dealers selling the same premium configurations.

That gatekeeping doesn't bring new people in. It also isn't honest about what most buyers actually need. A solid Gen 3 PVS-14 build costs a fraction of a top-tier setup and shows you everything a person new to NV needs to see at night. The difference between that and a $5,500 unit is measurable, but it's a refinement on top of an already complete experience. It's not the gap between seeing and not seeing.

Night vision should be accessible to anyone who wants to see in the dark. That's the entire point of this workshop.

Right now, Thorion Optics is a one-person operation. I source, build, ship, and follow up on every unit personally. There's no team, no fulfillment center, no separate customer service. If you buy something here, the person who built it answers your email.

I'm always sourcing tubes. If you have a specific build in mind, reach out and tell me your specs and budget. New tubes come through every week and I build to order.

This workshop exists for the people who want to see in the dark without spending their life away to do it.