Stop Replacing Your SIG Blomax Lamps Every Other Week
If you’re running a SIG Blomax line and you feel like you’re spending half your shift swapping out dead tubes, you aren’t alone. It’s frustrating. Usually, it comes down to two things: thermal stress and vibration. Most standard IR lamps just aren’t built for the chaos of a high-speed production floor. They can’t handle the constant shaking and the rapid heating cycles, so they just give up. We decided to fix that by beefing up the structural side of things. The heat problem To get that perfect wall thickness in a PET bottle, you need a ton of heat, and you need it fast. That means cramming high wattage into a small quartz envelope. When you push that much current through a thin filament, things get intense. If the quartz isn’t tough enough to handle those temperature swings, it stresses out and cracks. Simple as that. To stop the bleeding, we use heavy-wall quartz. It’s built to take the heat without breaking a sweat. It’s all in the seal A lot of people talk about “drop-in replacements,” but those only work if the fit is spot on. Here’s the real secret: most lamps die because the seal at the end fails. Once that seal goes, oxygen leaks in, hits the tungsten filament, and burns it out instantly. We’ve reinforced the ends of our lamps to make sure that vacuum seal actually stays put. It means the lamp can take a beating and keep on glowing. A quick heads-up Now, there’s a small trade-off. Because the quartz is thicker and tougher, it changes how the IR light passes through just a tiny bit. You might notice a slight difference compared to those ultra-thin glass tubes. You’ll probably need to tweak your oven temps by a few degrees to get your preform profile exactly where you want it. It takes two minutes, and it’s worth it. If you’re running multiple lines, it makes sense to grab these in bulk. It kills the downtime and saves your team from the endless cycle of replacing dead bulbs. Just wire them in, dial in your heat zones, and get back to actually producing bottles.