Fixing the Burn-out Problem: Our Sidel SBO 20 Series 1 Lamps
If you’re running SIG Blomax or Sidel SBO lines, you know the headache of tubes burning out. It usually comes down to two things: thermal shock or the quartz just giving up under the pressure. We got tired of seeing those failures, so we rebuilt our replacement lamps for the SBO 20 Series 1 to actually hold up. Getting the heat right Here’s the thing about the SBO 20: you have to hit that sweet spot where the PET preform reaches its glass transition temperature, but you can’t cook the neck. We make sure our lamps match the original OEM voltage and wattage exactly. Why? Because if you cram too many watts into a short tube, you get hot spots. And hot spots are basically a death sentence for your filament. Tougher glass, less stress Standard quartz is brittle. It hates the constant expanding and contracting of rapid cycling, and that’s why it cracks. We switched to a reinforced quartz blend. It handles the “breathing” of the machine much better than the generic stuff you find online. Plus, they’re drop-in replacements. The footprint and connectors are exactly where they should be, so you can just slide them into your oven racks without messing with the wiring or fighting with the brackets. A small trade-off Now, there is one thing to keep in mind. When you make a lamp this tough, the way it emits heat changes slightly. They’ll last longer and take a beating in a high-speed environment, but you might need to tweak your oven temps during the first few runs. Just a little bit of fine-tuning to make sure the heat is hitting the preform evenly. Less downtime, more running The real win here is getting rid of those annoying emergency stops caused by shattered tubes. By hardening the quartz, the lamps don’t just “pop” when the temperature drops suddenly or the machine hits a hard stop. Just plug them into your existing SBO 20 controllers, keep an eye on your cycle times to get the heat soak dialed in, and get back to work.