Getting the Heat Right in Glass Molding
Selling a lamp is the easy part. The hard part? Getting glass to flow just right without leaving behind internal stress or those annoying surface defects. For us, it’s not about picking a part number from a list. It’s about the physics of how heat actually moves. The push and pull of power To get glass to its working point, you need heat—and you need it fast. That’s why we lean toward high-wattage, 400V setups. It cranks up the heat density, which means your cycle times drop. You get the glass up to temp quickly. But there’s a catch. This puts a massive strain on your power supply. If your wiring isn’t built for those peaks, your terminals are going to burn out way sooner than they should. The gear that actually lasts We use high-purity quartz for the envelopes because it can take the thermal shock without cracking. You’ll see us using R7s or Sk15 connectors, too. We didn’t just pick those because they fit; we picked them because they keep a tight electrical connection. When things heat up and expand, you can’t have the power arcing. Sometimes, we use coated tubes. This shifts the emission spectrum so the heat sinks deep into the glass instead of just scorching the surface. Why we’d rather just come over and look at it Here’s the thing: “drop-in replacements” almost never fix a systemic heating problem. The lamp is just one piece of the puzzle. We prefer to get on your floor and see the whole loop. We check the angle of your reflectors, how far the lamp sits from the workpiece, and how the air is moving. If your cooling fans are in the wrong spot, the housing overheats and kills the filament. Simple as that. We look for those “cold spots” in your cycle and tweak the thermal footprint to match your specific glass chemistry. It beats the usual struggle of trying to speed up production only to end up with a mountain of scrap.