baking VHT paint

Using the kitchen oven for baking VHT paint doesn’t sound too healthy to me. So I had to find an other solution. My first thought was to get an adjustable heat gun and warm the pieces up with that. Worked more out less ok with the cylinder, which I painted first. But it took a good while for the cylinder to get warm enough. For the head, which is way bigger and heavier not really a solution.

So I had this idea for a temporary,  cheap,  improvised oven. A small hole in a big enough, but not too big card box and the heat gun should do the job.

Cardboard should have an ignition temperature of four hundred and something degrees celsius, the paint needs about one hundred, so everything should be fine. Because I got no thermometer (maybe my one day I should buy one) I needed to get an rough idea of the temperature of the air leaving the heat gun gun. What I did is I pointed the airgun very close to a corner of the card board and increased very slowly the temperature, till I reached the point where the card board was getting black and a little smoke started to rise. In my Steinel heat gun this was somewhere at seven or eight on a scale of one to nine.

I started to at five till everything was hot and then switched down to three. A bucket of water next to it  gives a slightly safer feeling while doing this.

The smell when baking it tells me that it was such a good idea, not to do it in the kitchen oven…

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baking VHT paint
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