Problem resolved, and mystery solved.

It’s always something, isn’t it? Just when you think you’re making some progress, sixteen roadblocks suddenly appear. Not necessarily crises, mind you, just things that suck time and energy away from what you’d intended to do.

One of my time-sinks last spring involved problems with a new kiln. I wrote a little bit last June (with this same photo of three of the kiln controllers I’d tested) but the whole story is this:

With a digital kiln, in theory, you should be able to program it and walk away, letting it run while you do something else (whether that’s more jewelry, making dinner, getting a good night’s sleep, or whatever). It should “ramp” up to the set temperature, run through its entire program, and finish with no error code being reported. And mine would appear to do that. Except….

Mine was not holding the set temperature. It was yo-yo-ing, getting up ok, not getting too hot (whew! since that would have melted the contents) but it was dropping hundreds of degrees lower than it should have. Thus, all the binder was burning out fine, but some pieces were coming out inadequately sintered. Since it was not reporting any errors, however, I had to watch its display to identify the problem.

The kiln was still under warranty. It really had never worked right. To get coverage, nonetheless, I had to make it clear to the distributor that it wasn’t just some fluke or mistake at my end but, instead, some semi-replicable problem. Since it was not generating any error codes, I had to monitor repeated firings, to document and report what I observed.

Not wanting the expense of shipping kilns back and forth under warranty, these products are manufactured with a number of parts that can be replaced by the end-user. When you report a problem, they try to figure out the cause, and send you the piece to replace yourself. Even if they’re wrong, it’s more of your time than their tech’s that has been wasted, and the postage for shipping a few parts back and forth is less to them than that of shipping the kiln. I don’t mean that as any sort of attack on the kiln manufacturers or distributors, just as a statement about modern business practice in general… Much of the time, the problems are simple, fixed quickly, and everyone is happy.

But, in order to know if the replacement has worked, I needed to again watch it run. And since my kiln’s problem occurred somewhat erratically, I had to watch it a number of times to be sure … that the problem still wasn’t fixed.

After several rounds of this, with no improvement, the distributor agreed to take back the original kiln and let me have a new one. In the end, I was happy with how they handled that, and with the new kiln I’ve been using since mid-June. In other words, the problem has been resolved for a while.

I had said, since I’d spent so much time bonding with that kiln as I just sat there monitoring its operation, if they ever did figure out what the problem was, I’d like to know. I got a message on Friday saying they’d finally gotten to it. Now even the mystery of what was wrong with it has been solved!

After replicating the replacements I’d made, with things like controllers and thermocouple (which I understood they had to do to first check that it hadn’t been “just me”), one of the only other obvious possibilities was the relay. They’d not had me try replacing that. (After the relay, pretty much all that is left is some wire and the actual heating elements, isn’t it?) Well, it wasn’t the relay either. That piece was fine.

The problem was that the plug at the end of the wire that connects to the relay was loose. (I assume that connection is made with a plug — or, more accurately, a lug — rather than a direct soldered joint so that the relay is also user-replaceable.) But there it was, a simple manufacturing error: a crimp that wasn’t tightened down enough. Does that sound familiar, or what?! Ha!!!

Anyway, my website (which I’m trying to do myself) is probably half a year behind where I thought it’d be right now. And a good two of those months are directly attributable to time I spent watching that kiln fail. (Part of my plan for the site had been to work on that some of the times when the kiln just ran in the background.) I know, that leaves another four months to account for (no, dear reader, I won’t bore you with tales of other distractions) but I will publicly admit that I’m happy to know exactly why I lost all that “spare” time … to a kiln!