[Chris Arrington]

Note: This is a cross post with the Armour Archive. I know some of us visit both sites, but only a small percentage. And I thought this was a neat DIY project that might interest both diverse groups.

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A couple of weeks ago, I told you guys how I had procured a very old Paragon pottery kiln that I was going to refurbish into a modern digital DIY heat treat kiln. I planned to use this for heat treating my hobby armor pieces and maybe knives/swords in the future.

http://forums.armourarchive.org/phpBB3/viewto...p;t=147707

I've started the project and I've documented the first step here at my blog

Initial Kiln Inspection

http://verms-projects.blogspot.com/

It is pretty long and image intensive, so I'll just post the first paragraph here:

[Aleksei Sosnovski]

I have built myself a small heat treating kiln. It is very crude and "orcish" but it works! I have heat treated spaulders, vambraces and some other small armor parts and one knife blade there. Your kiln is much bigger than mine so I envy you in a good sense.

Kilns like yours are normally intended for firing ceramics and so they are designed to operate at much higher temperatures than heat treating kilns. Thermocouples, SSRs and thermocontrollers are cheap as dirt on eBay so the biggest problem for you would be repairing the damaged bricks and baseplate and replacing the broken heating element. Make some research on how such repairs should be done and you should be fine. I don't see any fatal damage there.