Hawkbox

Oh you're using the nozzles for the 3D printer, yeah that makes more sense. I was trying to figure out why you were 3D printing nozzles.

Huh, that's fascinating and I really like the design Skidpad did up just to help wrap my head around what was being talked about. If it ever warms up enough outside that my water bucket in the garage thaws out I'll have to go down this rabbit hole again. Regarding 3D printing nozzles, I have to imagine that's not on your bog standard Ender 3 Pro unit? The tolerances seem like they would be far to fine for your average home use printer?

Are you looking for one to have running continuously or just to kind of eyeball it? I built a digital one because I don't believe my forge is getting hot enough and I don't honestly think my eyeball is telling me the same colour as other peoples eyeball. I found a design that suited my needs by googling "Forge Pyrometer" and it was a site from Caffrey Knives. If you have any electrical skill at all it should be a fairly simple PID setup. I had to swap the various part options out, that particular PID unit he recommends is nowhere to be found in Canada but really any controller that will do 1300C readout should suit your needs. I was able to put together one for around $60CAD which should be under $40USD if you look around. Or if you found a prebuilt one you're laughing.

You know what, I think I'm done here. I'll figure it out on my own. I'm sorry I don't know the specific search terms and hope to get something approaching help in a non condescending manner. Clearly I was delusional.

I'm now confused too, K-26 shows a 2600F fire rating while the ones I'm told are no good have a 2800F rating, which is somehow worse?

Thanks Mikey, I'm reasonably sure I can find Perlite. Yup good old Canadian Tire has it.

I would love to do it right, but this sites fixation on not linking other sites and vague suggestions to google do not help. I've spent days trying to find Canadian suppliers for anything recommended on this site, Plistex and Matrikote might as well literally not exist in Canada, Kast-o-lite is out of stock in the one place that lists it, not a single site I've been able to find specifies if a firebrick is K-26 or anything at all. I'm entirely open to suggestions but the idea that it's straight forward to find what Americans can easily get there hands on here in Canada is entirely not the case. The local blacksmithing group has no more access to the materials than I do so I am entirely at a loss of how to proceed without either waiting for shipping and duties from the US for however long that is or trying to work with the materials available to me.

I'm going to go buy a bunch of bricks from the local blacksmith I met on the weekend, probably not as good but for $11 each it gets me them ASAP. On that note, this appears to be the stuff he uses and has to supply if people want, is it any good compared to Kastolite 30 which I can't get right now?

A better price than the Chinese option at any rate.

Huh, that was the only one I could find that was in the $6 range and they wanted $120 CAD per brick in shipping charges.

Are we talking these Mikey?

I saw your post in the forge thread and googled it. I assume you mean the site that has a relationship with the 40 thieves and I only saw what looked like tubes of it there?

Those sound neat. I'm struggling to map in my mind what they will do.

It's not strictly on topic but I wanted to touch on this, I ended up taking the course over the weekend and he is incredibly friendly and knowledgeable. I've signed up for the next one too, didn't strictly help my forge heat but man did it educate me on a lot of basics around technique. Really appreciate you pointing me in that direction Swede. Deimos, that looks great.

I was working K-12 IT during the time and could have made triple my salary if I wanted to go work those jobs as people who could count and show up reliably were even more prized but I had absolutely no interest in going back to that kind of work after I stopped apprenticing. I'd have ended up with a massive cocaine habit just to stay awake I can picture it. I felt for the guys doing it but so many of them were wildly irresponsible with the money so when things tanked in 2008 most of them lost almost everything.