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Old 2018-02-16, 3:43am
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Moira Moira is offline
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Join Date: Jan 10, 2016
Location: Leicester, UK
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I am very sorry to hear about all the trouble and annoyance you've had.

There was a thread on Frit-Happens (UK) forum a few years ago about the risk of prodding a mandrel up into a hot kiln element whilst annealing beads in a Caldera and electrocuting yourself - which I thought was rather overcautious, I mean how carelessly does anyone put mandrels into a kiln?

But this temperature thing is a much better reason not to use a Caldera for garage annealing. When you think about it, this is a kiln with the elements around the side, and a separate lid - which is bound to leak a little air. Then you add a collar with no elements below the heat, and with a dirty great air gap to set up a convection of cool air upwards. How can it possibly heat evenly?

I am surprised that your 'upside-down' arrangement didn't work, I thought that sounded promising. Still - it didn't.

I think the Caldera is a great kiln if you want to work with glass and ceramics, because of the higher but still controllable temp. So, fine for batch annealing. The collar (used closed) would be useful for increasing the chamber height for, say, drop vases. You could use the door to peek in quickly to check the drop.

But I think your (annoying but valuable) work shows that the kiln as designed is just not going to give a satisfactory bead anneal. You could at best use it to 'semi-garage' your beads to batch anneal afterwards.

I hope you find a better bench-top bead kiln. Despite your frustration with Paragon, I wouldn't discount their SC2 - used by many with excellent results.

Moira x
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