If I have a heat treat oven, do I need a toaster oven?

Diomedes Industries

Diomedes Industries

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Mar 19, 2007
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I have a Paragon Heat Treat oven, and a Toaster oven - but the toaster oven doesn't keep as accurate heat as the Paragon. Is there any reason to update the toaster oven to a more accurate heat - or simply use the Paragon?

Thank you,
 
I could see a situation where you are heat treating multiple knives in series and the second oven would come in very handy for tempering while the paragon would still be available for the next HT.

-b
 
I use my toaster oven for kydex and use my kitchen oven (with external digital thermometers in it to monitor the temperature better!) for tempering blades usually. I want to build up a tempering oven soon with the old K23 bricks I got that are super heavy and run it on 110V once I get new bricks for my heat treat oven.
 
I use my little oven a lot. I have an aux thermometer to make sure my temperature stays where it needs to and I have to keep an eye on it, but it's super handy.
 
Here is a thread I did years ago on a simple way to control a toaster oven.
Stacy E. Apelt - Bladesmith

Thread 'Pid - Toaster Oven Conversion'

In an effort to help those who are challenged by trying to connect a PID and its associated circuitry to a device, I will give the procedure and setup to run a toaster oven as a tempering oven. The same hookup can run a variety of things (solenoid valve on a forge, salt pot, BBQ smoker, kiln, etc.), with the appropriate thermocouple and SSR. If you only want it to read temperature, you just use the thermocouple as a thermometer.

Some components can be found in thrift stores, other from online suppliers, and most everything can be purchased on Amazon or Ebay. Search for PID, Thermocouple...

The same control box can be used to control many other things that run off electricity. Just put the TC where it is needed to read the temperature and plug the device into the controller.
For example -
You can use it to turn the fan on and off in your shop when it gets to 90°F
Run a heater rod in your quench tank and set the PID to 120°F. You can also make it turn a green light on when the oil gets to temperature.
You can also control DC devices.
With a few gas line plumbing parts and a fuel gas solenoid, you can make a gas forge PID controlled. The tutorial is in the Stickys along with the toaster oven conversion.

eBay and Amazon have low-cost kits with almost all the components needed (PID, SSR, Heat sink, TC, TC wires.


BTW, the PID thread was in USA voltages. Obviously, use your country's voltages and TC wire codes ... yes ... TC color codes are different in some countries, too.
 
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