Kerr 666

I started the coil repair by cutting copper strips to use as a crimps.  In theory I only needed one but made several in an assortment of random sizes.

The entire lot was annealed .

A strip was reduced in thickness and work hardened in the roller mill. 

After all the effort I was unable to get the wires crimped on top of each other.  The notch on the top edge of the bar was supposed to be a crimp form.  It ended up being to wide.  I should have taken the time to make a correct one.  As you will see later this crimp may not last long.

Because people need to see goofs.   And this is what happens when you get tired of something and say 'good enough' when you know its not.

The over has an exterior shell of fiber insulation.  Inside that is a layer of 1" soft fire brick.  Inside that is the heating element.

Some of the soft fire brick were in bits so I replaced the back top and side bricks with my refractory test bricks.  The side bricks are shorter and I only had one.  A long one was cut with a serrated knife.  This is the cut off.  You can see there is moisture remaining in the brick.

The top of the oven is initially on the left in this video.

I put a refractory test cube from the same batch as the bricks I used and ran the oven at 80C overnight to dry the refractory bricks.

The next morning I removed the cube and broke it.  It was dry.  The refractory from the wet vs dry clay test.  This is one of the dry blocks.  It is noticeably weaker after heating overnight at 80C.

With the oven working I will be able to further test refractory.   High on that list is the addition of lime and my native clay vs western bentonite.

The crimp is not effective.  If the wires were in good contact, the contact area would have less resistance and it would not be hotter than the surrounding wire.

I ramped the oven up to 700C in several step.

Then I noticed I had neglected to install the bottom cover plate.   It most likely would not have been a problem but lets play it safe kinda of thing.







Currently I have the heating element and the insulating bricks back out.  My fear was the DIY refractory bricks would crumble.   It is easy to brush material from the surfaces but they did not break.  A coat of satanite should firm up the surfaces.

The satanite will take a day or two to dry.  So this may continue through the week.