48-Inch-Mirror-Blank-Project

Kiln-Design-Philosophy

The kiln for the 48 inch will be very expensive unless it is built specially as an extension of the 48 inch mold. By doing this I think we can keep the cost to 1/3 of the standard building methods.

Salient Points

• Use standard cheap Home Depot Sand to form a flat plateau on which the mold subpieces can be place

--This serves 2 purposes

• --1) allows laser leveling of the tops of the nub sub pieces so the casting nub depths will be correct and uniform. Webbing walls will have correct uniform thickness.
• --2) expensive flooring materials can be avoided. Fire Brick would run into the hundreds if not thousands of dollars, be hard to bond to one another in a fashion strong enough to maintain structural integrity and in the end sand would be required to allow the leveling process to occur. Thus eliminate the expensive part. Its not really used.

Mold Design

The refractory mold must be constructed in pieces due to its large size. The general idea is illustrated by the two photos of the scheme envisioned.