Glass Project Phase 1

I lucked into the purchase of an old kiln, 17.5″ inside diameter, with good fire brick and elements for $50Cdn on Kijiji! So, I’ll be working on the electronics to control it and power it over the winter so I can fire it up (perhaps literally, so outdoors!) in the spring and start playing around with melting old full thickness blanks into thin meniscus blanks (for example I have a couple of 10″ 1 1/2″ thick pyrex blanks that seem to have been used as tools (!) that could end up as 16″ meniscus blanks).

So far I’ve measured the resistance of the elements as approx. 23Ω per section, two elements per section so approx. 12Ω ea.  I have a couple of K-type thermocouples rated up to 1300C and MAX31855 thermocouple amplifiers to connect to a Raspberry Pi running kilnController, an open source project that “turns a Raspberry Pi into a cheap, universal & web-enabled kiln Controller.” I have a couple of 40A solid state relays as well so I think I have all the bits and pieces, now to start the build!