 Previously I was able to salvage a fair amount of my tools I made from scratch that were burned in my workshop fire. But there are still a few crucial tools needed for making more tools and items that were also destroyed in the fire, namely my kiln and propane forge. In this video I'm going to attempt to repair them myself, see if the effort is worth the cost or if I was just better off replacing them. Alright so here we have our pottery kiln unfortunately did not do too well in the fire. The good news is that it is intended to run at very high temperatures in the fire itself so the inside components where normally gets hot are pretty much all intact. All the insulation is pretty much undamaged and the elements in the thermal couple all look pretty good. Big damage was just on the outside and the worst part of that is the the actual electronics part looked around and there's not really an option to just buy this component. Actual device is pretty simple basically we have the heating elements you run power through it they get hot. The controller just has it's attached to a thermal couple which measures the temperature then you set a target temperature and if you are currently above it it turns it off and if you're below it it turns it on and it just kind of cycles through that to try and regulate the temperature. My goal is to try and build my own controller using a raspberry pie. You know take this apart remove all the damage components make sure everything still looks good try and clean it up as much as possible and then attach it with a raspberry pie starting price to basically replace one of these paid roughly a thousand dollars for this kiln um it's a decent window to try and replace it but in the end it should be a decent upgrade for not too expensive so let's see how well that goes the first step is going to be taking everything apart cleaning it up as best as possible and i'm going to start attaching the new electronics to be in that program don't look good but first real quick thank you to Skillshare for sponsoring this video anyone who's been watching our show knows the value we place in the pursuit of higher knowledge and that is exact benefit you get by using Skillshare. Skillshare is an online learning community with thousands of aspiring and creative classes for anyone who loves learning so I tried out a few different classes on programming raspberry pies for the very specific need I had of using it as a controller for our kiln it's not something I've really done before and it's not not really something I have any experience with so what's really useful is Skillshare where I can find a large variety of different videos where I can learn some of the skills and get used to using a raspberry pie so I can use it in rebuilding my kiln first 1000 of our viewers who use our code or click the link in the description will get a one month free trial of Skillshare so you can start unlocking your creativity today thanks again to Skillshare for sponsoring this video for again to the electronics of my kiln let's get the forge repaired today I'm going to try and recover the propane forge so what I have here is the mbox forge that was unfortunately caught in the fire and is pretty much toast right now so this forge was donated to us by adry who has appeared in a few of our videos so it's made out of an ammo box and it's been a pretty effective forge this is what I first started on when I was doing my own blacksmithing before we got the brick forge built and the overall design of it is pretty simple it's basically shoots propane mix it with air to produce a high flame and the whole thing is designed to operate at a pretty high temperature so a lot of the main components of it haven't really been too damaged this is a lot of the more outer things that aren't supposed to get quite so hot that will just need to be replaced and repaired some issues facing are that like the holes burned off a lot of the mechanics here for turning it on and off are probably not quite the greatest and then the whole thing just rusted mostly from probably the firefighting after a lot of the protective oxide on the outside of it burned off online a brand new forge like this costs them around $150 from what I found I think we can salvage it for less and I'm pretty confident about this one so let's give it a shot and see if it ends up actually being worth the time to restore it versus just buying a brand new one the forge up and running let's get back to the kiln of these guys back up and running take a fair amount of labor to remove all of the the rust off of everything forge was a little bit easier to do the recovery is just a lot of basic rust removal and they give it a new paint job in total it took roughly four hours to just do all of the repairs and everything and they did have to buy a few new parts with the valve and the hose so that was about $44 for that so the estimate for just buying a brand new forge of about the styles around $180 I saw doing all the manual labor myself and restoring it and just replacing a few parts ended up costing about $78 if I pay myself minimum wage the kiln however has proved to be a little bit more of a hassle and that's pretty much exclusively because of the raspberry pi it has taken a bit to reprogram it figure out how to get everything connected and running and operating program so raspberry pi offers a lot of solutions they have a nice little touch interface here rather than just like two buttons they have to scroll there's so many different things you can create your own cycle really easily and then run it you really don't even need the control could be run entirely remotely from your phone actually programming of it was quite a hassle a lot of back and forth ended up frying a raspberry pi and having to switch to another one I happen to have lying around so a bit of tweaking I still have left to do ended up being a bit of a pain to actually finally get running so be very cautious running this guy it really would be unfortunate to have any kind of fire so with all the extra time it took to troubleshoot the the kind of technical issues with that ended up driving the cost out for this however this was probably the most expensive single item that was inside the garage and lost retail price to replace at almost a thousand dollars so it never was able to find a just a replacement controller they sell it for larger models but not the small one that I think they just want you to buy a brand new one rather than spending at least a thousand dollars for another kill clean everything off took about six hours a little bit more tedious than the forge and then actually programming it took a good few days so it was something like 20 hours and I'm still not fully there again perfectly working then the parts out at around 350 dollars for the raspberry pi the screen having to buy a few components twice new cord switch etc etc that came out to 350 with the 26 hours of labor that's an extra 220 so that comes out to about 570 which is still almost half the price of buying the brand new one it's coming out pretty close to the price there and that's just because it takes a lot of a lot of time to actually figure out what I'm doing just hitting things in general is pretty important so it's nice to be able to build my own custom kilns rather than just uh breaking them all the time and overpaying to replace them so useful skills learned money saved I think this is pretty good hoping to get back into uh our actual regular content here still rebuilding the workshop things for rebuilding have slowing down a little bit but it has started and we've basically cleared out the roof and all the rubble things are moving forward a little slower than I'd like but I hope to be back up and running pretty quick here so pretty excited about that with some exciting new videos coming up pretty soon thanks again to all of our supporters on patreon thanks for watching if you enjoyed this video be sure to subscribe and check out other content we have covering a wide variety of topics also if you've enjoyed these series consider supporting us on patreon we are largely a fan funded channel and depend 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