The Rebuild and Exodus

    The week after Christmas marked the beginning of the furnace rebuild. It was finally cool enough, time to take it apart & put it back together again. They use an electric furnace which has a series of 9 U-shaped Molybdenum Disilicide elements suspended from the top of the furnace. The dismantling meant that we would have to unhook all the electrical connections at the top of the furnace, carefully remove the delicate elements through slots at the top of the furnace, remove the 700 pound crown (top of the furnace), lift the empty crucible out, then repeat all the above steps in reverse.

This is the old crucible and crown removed from the furnace.

Some weird crystalline growth on the surface of some of the elements.  It was like glitter. 

This is a view of the opened up furnace from above.  A week ago, this was 2000 degrees.

    All in all the rebuild took a few days.  Once it was all put back together, the program was set, and the furnace would slowly come back up to temperature over the course of 5 days or so.  Evan set the program and we hung out to make sure all was good.  Robin and James were there, we all played hacky sack - I haven't done that since the early '90s (great workout) - while the furnace came up to a couple hundred degrees.  To insure that the furnace gods would be appeased, we decorated the furnace with chalk drawings. This is the kind of thing you can really only do while it is cold.

    In the midst of the rebuild, a good friend of mine, Kate was moving away from Phoenix, AZ to Redwood City, which is just south of San Francisco.  Kate is an amazing person. I have known her for a good 18 or 19 years.  She is one of the most positive people I know - she has undergone a dramatic lifestyle change in the past few years, and has been writing about it on her blog. I highly recommend reading.  We got together for dinner. The last time we saw each other was in Philadelphia, a month or so before I left town.  It is always such a good thing to see friends away from the elements of our old lives.  The connection and history is still there, but we are no longer living in that history, we are present in the now of our lives.