Stop Wasting Bottles During Start-Up: Better IR Lamps for SACMI and Nissei
If you’re running SACMI rotary blow molders at full speed, you know that every single second counts. The real headache? That annoying lag when you first start up. When your lamps take too long to hit the right temperature, you end up with uneven heating. Then you get those frustrating wall-thickness defects, and suddenly your scrap bin is filling up before you’ve even hit your stride. We built our replacement lamps for Nissei ASB 150DP and SACMI setups specifically to kill that lag. How we actually made them faster It comes down to the guts of the lamp. We used a high-density tungsten filament wrapped in heavy-wall quartz. Why? Because fast starts require aggressive voltage spikes. Most lamps just burn out at the ends when you push them like that. But by tweaking the filament diameter and the gas fill, we cut down the “thermal inertia.” In plain English: the lamp heats up almost instantly. You get a much tighter heat curve, which means you stop throwing away bottles during the ramp-up. No fighting with the hardware There is nothing worse than a “universal” part that doesn’t actually fit. These are true drop-in replacements. We matched the Nissei and SACMI footprints exactly, so you can swap them out without wrestling with brackets. We also focused on the connectors. Those high-heat zones are brutal on gear. To stop oxidation—which is usually why you see voltage drops and burnt lamp bases—we used reinforced, gold-plated contacts. They just hold up better. A quick heads-up on the heat Here’s the trade-off. Because these lamps cram more energy into the preform in a shorter window, they put out a lot of radiant heat. Your machine frame will feel it. To keep things running smooth, make sure your cooling blowers are clean and nothing is blocking the airflow. If your cooling system is struggling, your oven components are going to take a beating over time. One pro tip: keep your heat shields polished. It keeps the IR energy pointing at the preform where it belongs, instead of baking your chassis.