Tempering Furnaces

The demand for tempered and laminated glass just keeps growing as creative designers continue to propose ways to make building exteriors more attractive and inviting, and to bring light and a feeling of freedom and space to interiors, both commercial and residential. Building codes require laminated or tempered glass for applications like exterior walls, windows and doors, see-through stair railings, and a host of other uses. Laminated glass is generally considered tougher and has the advantage of keeping broken glass bits in place. But tempered glass is less expensive than laminated glass, and about five times as strong as regular glass. So, in applications where strength is the highest value, only tempered glass will do. This includes everything from cookware to shower doors.

All other shaping, decorating, and edging processes must be completed before tempering, a consideration for organizing plant floor space.

All tempering furnaces will have a means to (1) load the glass into the furnace; (2) a heating section that can heat the glass to ~620° C and maintain the temperature for a specified period of time that depends on the thickness of the glass; (3) an air quenching section, providing even, quick cooling of the glass to lock in the desired compressive stresses at the top and bottom surface; (4) an unload section for the tempered and cooled product.

There is, naturally, a range of furnaces available to suit both large and small glass tempering manufacturers. They will be differentiated by the size of the equipment, batch versus continuous processing, details of their heating and cooling mechanisms, the quality and ease of use of their computerized control systems, and the durability of the materials used to construct the furnace.

At Glass Machinery Direct, you have the opportunity to purchase a pre-owned tempering furnace that will fit your factory layout and serve your glass tempering throughput needs for years to come. Contact a representative for help buying one of the reliable, full-featured furnaces displayed here, or for help finding exactly what you need.