Getting the Most Out of Your Homag Edgebander
When it’s time to swap out a heating lamp in your Homag, it’s easy to think you’re just replacing a lightbulb. But it’s actually more about where that heat is going. Standard quartz lamps are kind of messy. They throw radiation everywhere—half of it hits the machine housing or just floats away into the shop. That’s a waste of power. We use gold-coating technology to fix that. Why bother with gold? It sounds fancy, but it’s simple physics. Gold reflects infrared heat way better than aluminum or steel. By putting a thin layer of gold on the reflector or the tube, we basically force the heat to move in one direction: forward. Instead of heating up the air inside your machine, the energy hits the adhesive or the veneer exactly where it needs to. You get a much punchier beam of heat without having to pull more kilowatts from the wall. Installing them These are drop-in replacements. We make sure the voltage and wattage match your original Homag specs so you don’t accidentally trip a control board. One quick tip: if you’re using high-wattage tubes, keep an eye on your wiring. That kind of heat density makes the lamp ends get seriously hot. Just make sure your sockets are clean and snug. You don’t want any arcing happening back there. The trade-off Here’s the thing. Because the heat is so concentrated, the bonding happens a lot faster. But you have to be careful. If your feed speed is too slow, you’re basically putting a blowtorch to the wood. You might scorch the surface or cook the glue. When you switch over to gold-coated lamps, take a second to tweak your feed rate or temperature settings. It’ll save you from ruining a few pieces of material. And since we know shops get dusty, we build these to be tough. Just remember to keep the gold surface clean. Once resin builds up, you lose that reflectivity, and you’re back to square one.