The other day I found in the eternal pile of junk a 5 Lb spool of Number 30 Nichrome wire. Other than rewiring a toaster. What could I use it for? Joe
If you're industrious you could package it in ten ft rolls which would easily mail in a first class envelope. Then offer it for sale for $1.50 including shipping. A 100 ft roll on eBay is $2.90. You might make a small heat treat oven, but it's pretty fine. There are easy length/voltage calculators on the internet.
I had thought about some kind of oven but had the same thought on it being to small. It would be short lived and I don’t know the alloy so I don’t know what the maximum temperature is. I don’t sell on E-pay but if any of the members want any. I would be happy to send them a length for free. Joe
Here's the calculator I used (you have to ok the use of the old adobe program). http://www.jacobs-online.biz/nichrome/NichromeCalc.html For 1,500F you need 78.75 inches of 30 gauge Nichrome at 120 volts, takes 2.7 amps and puts out 325 watts. Look at Kelly's build thread and he shows how to wind a coil. Once you wind it, it gets a lot shorter. If you want to build a bigger oven just parallel several coils, ten would pull 27 amps and put out 3,250 watts. Play with the calculator and you get a feel for what your wire will do, it will do a lot.
Thank you but I probably wont be using it for a heat treat oven. Not knowing the alloy and it being so thin, with the work required to build one right just does not sound like something I would want to get into. I do have an older but nice commercial built small heat treat oven now. It works but could use a new controller. It is the older type where you set it by a rheostat. I would like to put a step controller on it. Joe
Or he could cut it up into 1foot sections and sell it to the vape crowd for 5bucks a foot. But that is a shitton of nichrome. Too bad it's so small....... Too fiddly to wind and install in a kiln.
Joe sent me some and I got it yesterday. I'm going to try some on my foam cutter. Just what I need, something else to play with. Thanks Joe!!
You are very welcome Jammer. Any one who would like some is also welcome to it. I have many life times worth. After looking at a weight length chart it would appear that there is around 12,000 foot. I don’t remember where it was originally found. I probably found it on one of my many excursions to the scrap yards where I paid an average of $.50 a pound if anything at all. I was friends with most of the owners of the yards in northern Indiana. Often something that had wood or plastic on it was of little scrap value and was free. I thought this was great. My wife was not so nuts about it. Now that I am getting old and we have gotten rid of one of our rule properties. I have been on a wholesale 4 year clean up of treasured merchandise! “Translation”, An old delapidate barn of a farm house on one postage size lot in the middle of BFE with a shop that was the gathering place for the local scrap thieves. The treasured merchandise is in the eye of the beholder. It was all salvaged over years from scrap yards, yard sales and dumpstur diving. Too many great things to use in 5 life times and not worth the effort to sort and sell. I am giving a lot of it away to anyone who can use it. I think I am down to 2 or 3 tons. I was wondering if I ever get into lost “?” casting if this wire could not be wrapped in the shell and used to control the cooling in the thin protrusions of a casting to help with freezing and the problem of hardens caused by fast cooling. It could be hooked to a power supply and control the temperature of the shell around the wire. Joe
