12-12-2015, 11:47 PM
Made some more progress on the furnace. I got the chamber and outer shell all back together with no pieces left over so I guess that's good. Yesterday I wanted to make a new face plate for the new controls. I don't have any aluminum sheet so that was out. I have a few pieces of galvanized steel sheet metal, but I didn't want to use that either. Luckily I did find a few small pieces of 16 gauge 316 stainless I had left though. That'll do.... 
I don't have a sheet metal brake either
so I had to make do with my SWAG press brake instead. First use actually since I put it together. It's far from perfect but I think it's "OK". Rather plain looking, but again - it'll do.
Views of old and new:
After that I attached the heat sink and SSR (with heat transfer grease) to the lower back panel with a couple of screws. Easy enough. The lower shell as you can see is VERY well vented.
I got a late start today but worked on getting everything wired together. One thing that bugged me was that the furnace itself had no circuit protection at all. It's rated at 6.3 amps but I'll be running the furnace on a 20 A circuit. So just for a little piece of mind I screwed a double fuse holder to the bottom plate and popped in a pair of 10 amp ceramic fuses for the 240 V line coming in on the cord. Just in case. I've got it all wired now EXCEPT for the new thermocouple. I called it quits for today.
Now the hard part comes. The leads on the thermocouple are much larger than I expected them to be. 16 gauge SOLID wire. Somehow I have to attach these to the teeny-tiny #4 terminal screws on the back of the PID controller....
I don't have a sheet metal brake either
so I had to make do with my SWAG press brake instead. First use actually since I put it together. It's far from perfect but I think it's "OK". Rather plain looking, but again - it'll do.Views of old and new:
After that I attached the heat sink and SSR (with heat transfer grease) to the lower back panel with a couple of screws. Easy enough. The lower shell as you can see is VERY well vented.
I got a late start today but worked on getting everything wired together. One thing that bugged me was that the furnace itself had no circuit protection at all. It's rated at 6.3 amps but I'll be running the furnace on a 20 A circuit. So just for a little piece of mind I screwed a double fuse holder to the bottom plate and popped in a pair of 10 amp ceramic fuses for the 240 V line coming in on the cord. Just in case. I've got it all wired now EXCEPT for the new thermocouple. I called it quits for today.
Now the hard part comes. The leads on the thermocouple are much larger than I expected them to be. 16 gauge SOLID wire. Somehow I have to attach these to the teeny-tiny #4 terminal screws on the back of the PID controller....
Willie