Stop Fighting Your SIG Blomax 10 Heat Distribution
If you’ve spent any time around a KHS or SIG Blomax 10, you know the headache of uneven heating. One minute everything is fine, and the next, you’re staring at PET bottles with weird wall thickness or structural weak spots that just shouldn’t be there. Usually, you’re stuck between two bad options: shell out a fortune for OEM parts or buy cheap generic tubes that burn out before you can even get them settled in. We got tired of that trade-off, so we built a replacement lamp that actually does the job without breaking the bank.
Getting the Heat Right
The Blomax 10 is picky. It needs a very specific wattage-to-length ratio to get the preform to that “sweet spot” temperature without melting the neck. Our lamps fit the original footprint exactly. But the real win is how we stabilized the voltage across the quartz. It kills those annoying “cold spots” you get with the low-grade stuff. And because the power density is higher, you can speed up your cycle times. The heat hits the PET material more consistently, which is a win for everyone. Just a heads-up: if your oven’s cooling fans are clogged with dust, these will run hotter than they should. Keep your vents clean.
The Nitty-Gritty
We used high-purity fused quartz here. Why? Because it stops the filament from giving up the ghost too early. Depending on how old your machine is, these use either an R7s or Sk15 interface. You just pop them in. No messing around with the sockets or rewiring your setup. We also tuned the internal halogen cycle to keep the filament centered. If the filament sags—which happens a lot as lamps age—your thermal profile goes out the window. By keeping it centered, the infrared radiation hits the preform exactly where it’s supposed to.
Real-World Use
These are a direct swap for KHS-compatible systems. Once they’re in, you’ll notice the heat field across the blowing mandrel looks a lot more uniform. The best part? You can stop fiddling with the oven temperature settings every twenty minutes. Installation is as simple as it gets. Just swap them out. One tip: replace your lamps in matched sets. It keeps the impedance balanced and saves you from having to recalibrate the whole heating bank.