Anybody ever wondered how the production line mass produces Fluorescent tubes?? check this video out Click Here 

I remember that vid. It from How It's Made. Not gonna last long on Youtube though. Copyright issues.

Ya im going to see if i could get that video from him and put it on a DVD very cool video, Wish Sylvania would show there H.I.D bulb production line, that would be cool. Would be pretty cool video on how they make Mercury Vapor, Sodium bulbs and, Metal Halide. 

I see that the etches seem to be very clearly printed 

Yeah. Why not inside etching them? Since the etches goes first before the phosphor. Looked like an U-bent UV lamp. Really cool.

I have seen that video a while back and i thought it was great! Thanks for sharing it!

Thats just bloody amazing!!!!, I`ve never seen this before.
Rich

And that is very old line as well which makes tubes vertically at speeds around 3000 per hour.  Since the mid 1960s when Sylvania USA invented the horizontal process, speeds have increased tremendously and now approach 10,000 tubes per hour, also in continuous motion without the traditional intermittent indexing motion of older machines.  Somebody should suggest Discovery channel to make a new video at GE's Bucyrus plant in Ohio, last year they invested $60 million to build a new high speed horizontal line and that would make much more impressive viewing!

Here is another film of a much more modern and impressive fluorescent line, this time at Philips' Salina factory in USA.  Still by far not the fastest, but fairly typical of a modern horizontal fluorescent tube factory.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7oLSJEq94Ms

And below yet another movie of Narva's slow-speed horizontal group in Germany.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ur5yPa4_j3c&feature=related

Interesting videos. I wonder if much of the machinery at the Salina, KS plant was originally built by Westinghouse, or maybe they were built after the Philips takeover but retaining the Westinghouse design. Because I have also seen a video of the Philips fluorescent plant in the Netherlands and the manufacturing equipment look completely different. Both factories probably have the same stem-making machinery that make the inner electrode assemblies though.

At the time of the Philips takeover, Westinghouse was making F40T12s and F96T12s at Salina, now all of the work from the old Fairmont, WV plant have been transferred there.

Oh one more thing, does SLI really make the German T5s for Osram? The German Osram Sylvania T5s look just like the ones from Italy. Osram Sylvania makes them in the USA for the North American market now.

Hi Dave,

Some of the glassmaking at Salina is made by a different process that I don't recognise from other Philips fluorescent factories, but I think the rest of the line is a standard Philips design.  Certajnly the tube end forming, phosphor coating, seal, exhaust and capping are Philips machines.  I was surprised though to see the flares for the stem being made on an American Swanson machine, usually Philips does not like those and favours vertical making of flares so maybe that is something left over from Westinghouse also!

Generally when Philips takes over someone else's factory, they are fast to rip out the manufacturing equipment and build completely new lines of their own design.  Especially during the 1970s and 80s the lamp machine-building factory in Holland had the most massive equipment construction plan you can imagine, literally hundreds of millions of dollars worth of machinery in construction to replace lines all over the world and get all Philips factories making products by the same standardised processes.  The same happened again more recently when they took over Pila in Poland, something like 70 incandescent and TL lines were ripped out and replaced with complete new equipment in just a couple of years.

Anyway, I found also now a video online of Philips Roosendaal mother factory in Holland, so you can compere the process ;-)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cJM4Smd3Q0M

And more pleased to see that GE also put up some footage of its brand new line at Bucyrus, see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wxs5S0eRezU

Neat, wonder if theres any on SOX production?, I`d love to see that.

James, is it possible to retain some of the same processes on new machinery? I have done many side to side comparasions between the old Westinghouse fluorescent lamps and the newer US made Philips fluorescent lamps they are quite similar aside from the stems and end caps. The phosphor distribution is exactly the same. By comparasion the Philips fluorescent lamps made in Holland (and even some made in Mexico) are different in phosphor distribution and other things.

At least I am sure the Philips U bent fluorescent lamps are made on the Westinghouse machines they still have the Westinghouse stems and electrode lead design. The U bents were originally made at Fairmont, now they are made in Mexico.

Wow that GE F32T8 line at Bucyrus is impressive! BTW I saw a video of the machinery at Winchester making incandescent bulbs just before the plant closed. Very impressive and very fast. GE moved most of its incandescent operations to Mexico and some were outsoirced to China. The Ohio Lamp Plant still operates today but they are a speciality plant they don't make GLS.

The vids are great!
I now think about visiting a lamp fabric 
There are so many lamps which I liked to see producing like MV replacment lamps

Hi Dave,

Maybe you are right, for certain older and more specialised lines like U-Bend which are not a big priority, they maybe did keep old equipment going.  And each line is in fact a group of many separate machines all coupled together, so it would not be unusual to upgrade some of the individual processes and keep other older units going.

You are lucky to have seen a video of the Pro-80 GLS lines at Winchester, those are indeed the fastest incandescent lines worldwide, a real feat of engineering.  Is that video also online?  I have looked long and hard for it in recent years but never found it publically, I only saw it once many years ago on an internal video while working at GE.  The cost of building them was phenomenal and probably made no sense financially, but they were built at a time when GE Lighting was rich and without there being any low-cost competition, companies could afford to make huge investments like that.  

Only Osram seems to make such huge investments today in modern machinery, we always say they are first a machine building company, and second a lampmaker!  See for instance their newer CFL line at Augsburg, which has kept CFL production in EU rather than outsourcing from China http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n6JkBxg-xxo