Getting Glass Tempering Right After Screen Printing
Here is the tricky part about combining screen printing and tempering: you’re basically fighting physics. You need enough heat to set the ink and get the glass ready for the furnace, but if you just blast it with raw heat, you’ll end up with blurry patterns or, worse, shattered glass. That’s where shortwave IR lamps come in. They act as the bridge. Keeping your prints sharp The goal is to get the glass hot, and fast. We use high-wattage shortwave IR lamps because they dive straight into the glass surface without wasting energy heating up the air around it. This is huge. It stops the ink from bleeding or shifting before it actually sets. If you go too low on the power, the core of the glass stays cold. Then you’re forced to slow down the conveyor belt just to compensate, and suddenly your production speed tanks. The balancing act: Speed vs. Stress It’s all about how fast you ramp up the temperature. With shortwave IR, you can hit your target temp in a few seconds. This makes sure the ink is fused tight to the glass before it ever hits the tempering stage. But there’s a catch. High-intensity IR creates a steep heat gradient. You have to be careful with your lamp distance and belt speed. If the lamps are too close, you’ll get hot spots. That’s a recipe for distorted prints or a piece of glass cracking right in the middle of the line. Real-world setup When you’re actually wiring this thing up, make sure your power supply is rock solid. Any flicker leads to uneven heating, and that’s a headache you don’t want. We usually go with quartz-halogen tubes. They’re great because they react instantly. It’s like a light switch—on or off. This means when you switch to a different glass thickness, you can tweak the heat profile on the fly. Just a heads-up: these tubes put off a ton of ambient heat. Make sure your housing and cooling fans are beefy enough to handle it. If you skimp there, you’ll fry your control electronics in no time.