RIP Fawn Liebowitz.

That's all I know about Kilns.

Rolling a kiln out to use is feasible. Probably won’t appease the insurance people. A few things to remember - It will put out some pretty serious heat. The firebricks are soft/fragile. You don’t want the kiln to get caught in the rain.

The rolling out is obviously a plus for using it. I would work along the idea of something on soft, air filled tires because the bricks are that fragile. Breaking one with your bare hands is rather easy.

Buying one I would be shopping used ones. At the same time, knowing how fragile they are, look inside for broken bricks. They can be replaced and cutting them is within your ability, but I wouldn’t pay much for a kiln where I had to replace a number of them.

quote:

Originally posted by CPD SIG:
RIP Fawn Liebowitz.

That's all I know about Kilns.

Beat!

quote:

Originally posted by CPD SIG:
RIP Fawn Liebowitz.

That's all I know about Kilns.

Epic! Now if she could just arrange some dates for my friends...

quote:

Originally posted by DennisM:

quote:

Originally posted by CPD SIG:
RIP Fawn Liebowitz.

That's all I know about Kilns.

Epic! Now if she could just arrange some dates for my friends...

Only if you allow others to dance wiff em.

I use an Evenheat for heat treatments for knives.

High carbon steel requires 1500°F, while stainless steel requires 2000°F.

It has a solid state controller that can do complex “recipes” (coming from the pottery world naturally), but that complexity is not needed and knife making. What is required is precise temperature control. Much better than a coke/gas forge.

240v, 13 amps.

Sorry to resurrect this old thread, but I wanted to report back with the resolution. My wife ended up finding a used kiln on facebook marketplace, and we bought it. It's an older Duncan, but in good shape (no broken bricks and the coils are still all in their recesses), and came with a bunch of accessories like a rolling cart, a wide variety of cones, shelves, an electric thermocouple to monitor the temperature, and a variety of glazes. We paid $500 for it all, but probably got close to $250 worth of extras, so it wasn't a bad deal.

I had to wire the garage for 220, which meant replacing the main service entrance panel and rewiring it back to the meter. I tried to find somebody to do it, and couldn't get on anybody's schedule after 2 months, so I ended up doing it myself. It's a huge pain to find 200 amp panels right now, and wire is ruinously expensive. Ultimately I had to go with a huge 40 breaker panel, because that was all I could find locally, but I guess it gives me room to expand (way more than I'll ever need, but I guess it's better than too little). Thankfully it was a short run, and I managed to get it done without electrocuting myself or setting the house on fire.

The weather was nice yesterday and today, so we did a test fire of the Kiln in the driveway yesterday and it worked great. Got up to cone 5 in about 2 hours, and then spent the rest of the day cooling off. She fired it again today to do a bisque fire of all the pottery she's been collecting for the past 3 months, and once again it worked really well. A couple had some small cracks, but nothing shattered or exploded, and the cone setter worked as designed. It was definitely nice to have the thermocouple to be able to monitor the temps in real time as well. Looks like the next step will be glazing.

Thanks everybody for your input. This project was a bit involved, but it's done, and wife is happy, so I'm happy!

Sounds like a great deal! Glad it’s working out.

Just be careful — my mom got into working with glass as a hobby and, 20 years later, she now has a collection of kilns to her name .. including a couple of those huge coffin kilns. She loves it .. and she makes incredible stuff.

It all started with her asking my dad to get her a baby kiln to “just play around with” .

Second firing of the kiln yesterday, first one was a bisque fire, and this time was for glaze, so it was our first time seeing her finished product. She left it to cool all night, so I peeked inside when I got home from work this morning. Seems to have worked, and it didn't even run and make a mess. I'm pretty impressed with what she's accomplished so far!

Have you tried it out to melt lead for casting boolits yet?

Very happy for you guys and that you could get it all set up for her! Great work! Both of you!

quote:

Originally posted by architect:
Have you tried it out to melt lead for casting boolits yet?

Lol, no, and I don't think she'd appreciate it. This thing gets a lot hotter than what I'd need for that anyway, and I already have a pot for that.

I was tempted to drop a piece of an old sawzall blade in there that I was making into a front sight blade for my 03a3. I had it all cut to spec, but was having a heck of a time drilling the pin hole. Was tearing up bits left and right. I though maybe heating it up in there would remove the temper and make it easier to drill, but I finally managed to get through it with a cobalt bit before she was ready to do another firing.