In today's episode of The Plutonium Bunny I show how I turned a regular boring household toaster into a powerful temperature-controlled electric furnace capable of reaching over 1000°C. What started as a meme project during COVID turned out to be a quality tool for metal melting, high-temperature chemistry, ceramics, and heat treatment of metals.

Through the video I show how I disassembled the toaster to recover useful parts and made use of items I had lying around to construct the furnace. I demonstrate how I built nichrome wire coils for the furnace heating elements and detail some of the planning considerations that went into building this. I also talk about the refractory insulation mixture I made to build my custom refractory bricks. Finally, I show the furnace melting aluminum casting alloy for an upcoming project. The best thing about using this for metal-melting is that it is completely quiet, makes no fumes, needs no fuel, and can be safely run in the warm, dry confines of a garage.

This furnace uses the nichrome resistance heating coils (or wire) from the toaster as its heating coils, as well as some of the other toaster components like the insulating mica sheets. The steel furnace shell is build from sheet metal off an old kitchen microwave, and the insulating bricks are a custom mixture of fireclay, play sand, and perlite from the gardening store. I used a PID controller and thermocouple for temperature control. Currently, my PID controller only ever gets to a temperature about 100°C below where you set it, so if you know how to adjust PID to fix this, please enlighten me.

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Check out my website (updated infrequently lol): https://sciencewithscreens.blogspot.com/