An old industrial electric kiln, a waste of time or deal time?

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peppen108

Joined
Apr 14, 2012
Messages
663


2,2kW
5x5x10" internal measurements
Was working when it was disassembled.
Price 200$

Comes with temperate and control units "shown" to the right in the picture!

Is this a good deal or am i bringing misery upon my self?

Could a digital control unit be fitted and what would the cost be roughly?
 
If it is really only 5x5x10" inside, it will limit you to folding knives and hunter/skinner size work mostly.
What are the temperature control items there? Are they not digital?
If the controls are not digital already, some reading here in the stickies and searches will yield enough info to rig up a PID and SSR combo to control it, if you are decent at hands-on.
Cost might be $100-200 to retrofit it digital? I'm sure Stacy will be along though, he likes this topic.
 
Most of the knifemakers I know are pretty comfortable messing about with the engineering-type stuff. The electrickery is what seems to give them cause for concern. Obviously YMMV.

To make that work well as a HT unit, you'll need to do quite a lot of the electrical stuff; fit a ramp/soak controller, wire it up and tune it. The bit you'd keep is the kiln itself. The $200 you'd spend on it would go a long way to buying the IFBs and elements to build something of whatever size would be ideal for you.

Whatever it would cost to get that doing a reasonable job on small blades, starting from scratch and putting in maybe another $100 and one to two days work, you could have something that would do exactly what you want it to do.
 
I made about 150 knives with a kiln smaller than that. A 10" knife is plenty :) That said, you're looking at another 100 at least for the PID/SSR you'll need. With $200 for the kiln, you're in around $300 what you'll end up with. I only had half that in my small one that I found on craigslist, and my brother got a small one in the 100 price range also. For what it is, the price is a little high IMO. On the other hand, it's 1/3 the cost of a new Paragon by the time you get it fixed up.
 
That's placing your [relatively short] knives awfully close to the heating elements, and not much space for any sort of thermal shrouding, so who knows what kind of radiative temps you can expect on a 7" long knife (so, a fixed blade knife with about 3-1/2" blade) with the greatest distance from ANY element only being 2.5"...

...and that assumes you're doing one blade at a time. Not very efficient.

Might be a good tempering oven, I guess, where you don't need to be concerned with super high temps and proximity to the elements...
 
Thanks for the topic OP. I've had the same question run through my head as nice pottery kilns pop-up daily and hover around the same price point... Judging by the input, there's no exclusive yes or no answer... It leads us noobs to understand HT as either magic, an exact science, or somewhere in-between... I would base the right answer as being; whatever falls within/upon your needs and capabilities, materials used, wants, end product, etc., etc...

Not trying to negate the professionals, just trying to quell their known and respected hunger for exactness, precision, efficiency, positive clout, and all the other things that stir their spirit.


I'm approaching things from the subtle pleasure of learning a craft and understanding the variable strengths and weaknesses I can inflict up a substance that has no breath but can't be denied a soul... Will everything I make have the tolerances and precision of laser guided missile? probably not, because it's a knife, not a JDAM... Will the individual using it be disappointed in the subtle smell of metallurgical inefficiency? Chances favor me, because in all likelihood he's not a blade sniffing beagle...

I'm not promoting poor quality. I'm just saying an engineer's insight into a craft shrouded in mystery/chaos might find consistent variation from the mean, but nothing is ever spot-on, certain, or unsinkable.
 
I'm not sure what any of that means...but it isn't engineering when a something is a bad deal.




I have used and owned dozens of kilns and oven types over the past forty years. I have talked with people who have used and modified many others and seen what they have done. It isn't engineering snobbery or over-exactness that says a 5X5X10" chamber isn't suitable for anything but a 4-5" long blade...and it won't do a batch of those. I get a chuckle when people who haven't built a forge/don't own an oven/forged one knife/can't get a good HT/etc. give sage advice on what "works" and how to skirt the edged and modify well established norms.
 
Stacy, thanks for responding to this, because frankly I wasn't certain how to without forehead slapping. I thought I was pretty clear about 'why'!

For the clarification of others, the heating elements don't run at the set temp. They need to run HOTTER than the set temp so they can bring the entire kiln to the set temp. They radiate this energy, so locations closer to them will invariably be hotter than areas further away. MUCH hotter (easily a couple hundred degrees). If the tip of your blade is an inch away from an element and your kiln is set for 1500 degrees, I guarantee you that the tip of your blade sees 1700 degrees or so for a while. Don't need a blade sniffing beagle to realize what happens then!
A shroud can be used to keep this direct energy at bay, but with so little room in there to make one, the limitations of its size become more and more problematic.
 
SinePari said:
Not trying to negate the professionals, just trying to quell their known and respected hunger for exactness, precision, efficiency
Click to expand...

Well there's your problem, can't really use force around here ;0)

quell

verb
put an end to (a rebellion or other disorder), typically by the use of force.



And to the rest of your post.... I say que the music

[video=youtube;dFtLONl4cNc]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dFtLONl4cNc[/video]
 
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Seeing as you're in Sweden, I assume it's like Canada, only smaller
The used market of stuff is not like the USA has.



I'd buy it for $20, but not $200

Maybe it's fast to get it working again and you have a working oven for ones of small knives.

It looks well made, maybe you use that as an example when you build the oven you want.



See how cheap you can get it, in the photo it looks like it's junk to them and they need to clear out a space.
 
Thanks for the input guys. I could sen of six batches of five blades for the price i would pay to get this thing up and running. That should last med 2 - 3 years. So i will send the blades i cant do i the gas forge of to HT and the by a longer kiln down the road.
 
1234567890 you are right I have never seen a knife makers kiln in the 2 hand market here. That is why I was tempted.
 
I agree with the last few posts. Heat treat is not a "good enough" type process. The more exact you get, the better. I now have a kiln, and it's much better than the forge, but salt pots would be better. Heat treat is the last place to cut corners and make guesses.
 
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