After outsourcing most of it's lamp manufacturing in late 80's - early 90's, Airam continued to produce itself some special application incandescent lamps. Today's news told that Airam is going to close it's last incandescent lamp factory which is located at Suutarila, Helsinki. Last order of 50 000 lamps is ordered by government owned railway company VR. Those are lamps used in railway signaling equipments.

The original article is in finnish but you can try to read it thru some translator site but atleast google translator did not do very good translating. There are however, some pics and video from the factory.


https://yle.fi/uutiset/3-9986984

Worth it to ask how much $ they want for the stuff - There could be surprises. It would be shame to let the equipment be lost

It said on the article that equipments are from 50's and are going to end up in museum or for scrap. The foreman also noted those are at the end of their life. I would guess that for the price of scrap metal those would be for sale.

Very highly worth getting then

If the equipment worked from the 50s with much higher production volumes in its past, it means that the main parts are in working condition, and even if they are wearing out, their subsequent wear is slowed down inversely proportionally to the production volume. Some parts are made to wear - bearings, rails, cylinders - They are replaced as they wear and have been replaced many times over the machine's life. Nothing of that is a showstopper

The machines could be used for making LED filament lamps (using filaments from other manufacturer), and this may be enough to cover the costs of keeping and running it. Then, the same equipment could be used for many more things including : Halogen retrofits (again using capsules from other manufacturers and only enclosing them in the outer bulb), small HIDs (using G8.5 lamp inside an outer bulb), stems for Fluorescent cathodes (there is need to add emitter coating step, the rest of the tube could be done using adapted Neon shop equipment)

The current production volume appears to be 300 lamps per day and everything runs with only three employee working. The foreman notes on the article that getting materials has become very hard novadays and they had to search all over the world to get everything.


I'm not going to be the one to ask though cause:

-Even if I would get them free, I have no place where to relocated that stuff and no money for rent space so big. Because of the climate, you can't store anything outside here.

-no money for pay the transport.

-I live 800km away for that place.

We two aren't alone interested in lamps, are we ? Lets see what others have to say

True, and I would guess that since these are so old machinery, they dont have any expensive and difficult to repair electronics like logics and such. So most likely very mechanical and simple machinery.

I would guess that making incandescent is way more easier with these than making sox in that philips machinery.

It is. The mere fact that it is 3 people's factory means, that it is very good project to take on for "beignners". Chances are high that with even lower production volume, it will be possible to run by 1 man

In my project, the machinery is much newer (90s and 00s), highly computerised, but while it means that it is more complicated, it also means that with the right reprogramming (basically, serialising the process instead of everything happening at the same time) it will be posible to run efficiently with only one machine operator doing only some specific minor action, if any manual intervention is needed at all