Hello ladies and gents,
I've had a cold the past few days, so I haven't been able to go over to my uncle's property to reload and shoot with him. I should be good enough to be non-contagious tomorrow.
In the meantime, I decided to get started on a project I've neglected. A couple years ago... being tired of my Lee drip-o-matics (which actually have served me very well for the money)... i snagged a really terribly beat up Saeco bottom pour furnace from Ebay.
It's beat to hell, didn't work, rusty, and needs a lot of loving. Luckily... I'm an electronics tech, and my dad owns a pretty awesome machine shop. So I should have anything and everything I'd need to clean it up and restore it to perfect function.
The first thing I did was disassemble it the rest of the way, which is pretty self explanatory once you have one in front of you. I didn't know if the heating element would be any good or not. I used a Fluke meter to test the heater element, and got a reading of 19 ohms. NOTE: On something really old and scroungy, you might have to clean up the ends of the elements to GET a resistance reading in the first place. I wonder how many guys have thought they had a bad element, when really... they just had a badly oxidized, dirty surface that made it impossible to get a good reading?
Anyway... by ohms law, we can figure out if that 19 ohm reading should be in the ball park.
P in watts = (Voltage x Voltage)/Resistance = (120V * 120V)/19 ohms = 757.89 Watts.
So my heating element is probably good. Awesome!
Buried inside the housing on front I also found the thermostat. The ebay seller didn't think it had one... but in fact... the retaining nut had just fallen off at some point, and the thermostat fell down inside the housing a bit out of sight. The temp control seems to be locked up. I'm going to hit that with some contact cleaner in a bit and see if I can get it to loosen up. If i can't get the thermostat cleaned up and working again... I'll either retro-fit one from my 10lb Lee pot in there, or just control temp with a PID and a K thermocouple. I'd like to keep the Saeco pot as original as reasonably possible though.
After disassembling everything, I masked off the front panel with tape, put all fo the rusty parts in the sand blaster, and got them cleaned up. Right now I'm about to go back out to the machine shop and paint everything with some high temperature black stove paint. The front panel is in pretty decent shape, so I will eventually just try to clean that up with some cleaner... and maybe some jeweler's rouge or whatever polishing compound I can find.
below are photos from when I was taking it apart, linked from Photobucket.