Stop Fighting Your Furnace: Custom IR Lamps for Tight Spaces
Let’s be honest: standard straight quartz tubes are a pain when you’re working with a non-standard bending furnace. If your kiln is cramped, trying to jam a standard lamp into a tight radius is a recipe for disaster. You either end up breaking the lamp or—even worse—you get those annoying cold spots in your glass that ruin the whole piece. We deal with this by just building the lamps to fit your actual space. Custom lengths, custom shapes. No guesswork. Making it fit (and actually work) When you’re bending glass, you need the heat to be the same everywhere across the curve. If you’re using a bunch of straight tubes staggered together, you get gaps. Gaps mean uneven heat. By bending the lamp to follow the contour of your furnace, we get rid of those dead zones. The footprint is smaller, and the heat hits exactly where the glass needs to soften. It just works better. The tricky part Now, you can’t just bend a tube and call it a day. Changing the shape messes with the physics inside the lamp. It changes how the filament sits and how the halogen cycle moves. That’s why we spend time calibrating the wattage and voltage. We make sure the filament doesn’t sag or burn out the second it hits that curve. One heads-up, though: these custom lamps put out a lot of intense, localized heat. If you crank the wattage too high in a tiny, curved area, just make sure your housing and wiring can handle the heat. You don’t want your wires melting because you pushed the lamp too hard. Getting it installed We design these to be drop-in replacements. Send us your CAD drawings, and we’ll match the dimensions—whether it’s a specific length for a proprietary rail or a weird arc for a specialized mold. The best part? You can ditch those bulky reflector arrays that take up way too much room. You just wire it up, set your PID controller, and you’ve got a steady, consistent heat profile across the entire bend. Simple.