iovanalex's ganduri de inginer … si nu numai

31Jan/104

Heat treatment oven – DIY

As you can see from some of my previous posts for some time now I'm interested in metallurgy and knifemaking. Without being a fan(atical) of knives I reached the conclusion that most of the knives we use everyday are of bad quality :)

Being interested in knifemaking I've found that one of the most important aspects in good quality blade is .. . no surprise, the steel :) And a good steel is obtained after some heat treatments.
The idea behind heat treatment is not very complicated to understand but the specificities of each type of steel are the hard part which transform the heat treatment into some kind of art ... or black magic.
Anyway the necessary but not sufficient condition to do heat treatment is to have some kind of oven which allows you the control very precisely the temperature inside (in some situations you need less than 1% variance) .

Being interested in different aspects of embedded systems and control I will try to present some technical aspects of building such a device in other posts but for the moment I give you, below, a simple tutorial I've found in the Internet of how you could build in a DIY fashion a small scale oven by using a standard PID controller (as you may know for temperature control a PI controller is sufficient bu usually you can find easily PID controllers so that would be any problem if you use any of them).

Comments (4) Trackbacks (0)
  1. you’re completely crazy!!! =))))))))))

  2. sorry for approving your comment just now;
    i was thinking … :P

  3. I really enjoyed your video. I’ve been wanting to build a similar oven for quite some time. What’s the voltage across your heating element?

  4. Sory, but is not my own video.
    I found it on the internet an embedded it in my post.
    Anyway, being in Europe I have 220V A.C. on the power lines so, I used this voltage on the heating elements. Actualy I took the entire heating element from a home appliance and insertes in the bricks.
    The main part is the control algorithm: now I’m using some sort of PWM over the solid state relay, via an Arduino board. In the future (summer break) I intend implementing a PID control to enable different heating profiles.
    I’m looking foreword to see your progress …


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