What Is a Glass Lathe?

Glass work lathe is the main equipment for manufacturing optical fiber preforms. Glass lathes also refer to special lathes for welding or other thermal processing of glass products. It differs from ordinary machining lathes in that it has a chuck that can rotate synchronously with a quartz tube and a flame lamp that can move back and forth. Both rotary motion and reciprocating motion can be fine-tuned, and the dimensional accuracy of each part is high. Generally, optical fiber prefabricated melting lathes are equipped with precision components such as diameter measuring sensors, quartz tube geometric size controllers and air supply flow control. ^[1]

A glass lathe is a special lathe for welding or other thermal processing of glass products. It is also the main machine of the entire equipment system for manufacturing optical fiber blanks.

The glass lamp lathe is mainly composed of a cast iron bed frame, a pair of concentrically moving rotors, a transmission mechanism and a flame heating device. The rotor is equipped with a chuck.

The accuracy of MCVD glass lathes is higher than that of ordinary lighting lathes, mainly due to:

(1) Two chucks are attached to both sides of the rotor to correct the straightness of the tube;

(2) The rotor and the carriage are driven by a fast-responding micro-motor, and the speed can be controlled very stably;

(3) The dimensional accuracy of each part is high, the center deviation between the two rotors is less than 0.025mm, and the parallelism deviation between the rotor and the bed is less than 0.011mm.