Toaster oven "upgrade"

After ever increasing temperature instability with my $7 Goodwill toaster oven I started looking at options. Replace the oven and hope for better results, maybe build a PID for the oven, whatever. Then it crossed my mind to look at something bigger. I found a 24" wall oven with digital readout and a built in timer on Facebook marketplace. I have enough room for it in my shop and could easily pull 220 from the panel. I even had a length of 10/3 cable. I bought it for $50 and took it home to try it out.

I set the bake temp at 400° and placed my oven thermometer on the middle shelf. When it beeped and the readout said 400° I opened the door and checked the thermometer. Right on the money. A real advantage of this over a toaster oven is capacity. I would put about 50 of the 240 grain boolits in the toaster oven and watch the thermometer drop and try to catch up. I put 100 of them in this oven and it never moved from the set point. That is a lot of cold lead. Having the built in timer is helpful too.

I use a full size oven in my shop for PC What I like is adding a tray as I take one out so every 10 to 15 mins I have a batch going in and coming out. I stack and spray while they are baking I can turn out a pile of bullets doing it that way. The weak link in my process is keeping up with the oven now.

I am thinking I could run two trays at once in this but I will have to work my way up to that. Still trying to decide between spray or tumbler application. These were done in the tumbler after I applied a faint coat of V twin Orange powder overspray to my Brilliant Black Ram crew cab the other day. I need to look into an ventilation system as well. I did not realize that I had that much drift.

Cover the bottom of the oven with firebricks or some other heat retaining material and it will recover much faster after the door's been open.

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Originally Posted by Grmps

Cover the bottom of the oven with firebricks or some other heat retaining material and it will recover much faster after the door's been open.

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I was wondering if a 5 x 9 piece of 3/8 steel would do the same thing for my small toaster.

luckily my toaster oven is still doing fine.

I can fill two metal mesh trays and cook them in less than 20 minutes--that's just about enough time for me to coat and fill the next two.

when push comes to shove I can get 3 trays in by stacking another on top of the bottom one.

The insulation in a full size oven is much better than a toaster oven. Adding more steel, bricks, etc. to either oven type only increases the dynamic load, meaning more items to heat up therefore a longer time to come up to temperature.
Retaining the heat may help if you are doing multiple loads and opening and closing the door, but it will not be any help on a single load and is actually a handicap. I have 4 racks in my oven, so when it is loaded with 4 half sheet trays it takes a considerable amount of time to bring the bullets up to temperature, even with convection. Just remember the probe is measuring the air temperature in the oven and not the actual temperature of the bullets. The bullets need to come up to 400 degrees before the timing starts. I do a quick check with an infrared thermometer to see if the temp is close before I start timing and I still give it a few extra minutes.

I was thinking of trying to add insulation to my toaster oven.
Not sure what good it would do, but should help keep the heat in.
Suggestion on what material I might try????

Ceramic insulation, however by the time you buy and figure a way to install it you would be far better off just buying a better oven. My countertop Hamilton Beach Convection Ovens come to temp and hold it; that's all it needs to do.

In the old days, used to use asbestos.
Then went to heat proof fiberglass.
What is now used to insulate ovens????

Ceramic blankets (kaowool)

In a toaster oven I would expect to find fiberglass as ceramic is expensive. If you look at most toaster ovens they are build cheap. Most have glass doors that do not seal well, but some toaster ovens are better than others. If you have the space a kitchen oven will typically be a be a good choice especially if it is convection. Here is a 30" all digital convection oven I got for free because the control panel was shot. I installed a PID, timer & fans. and have about $100 total invested, but it holds to about 2 degrees and I can do larger projects or thousands of bullets.Attachment 227935