angstqueen

Thank you, everyone! I was beginning to feel pretty nuts for passing on these old kilns. I would ask the seller if the kiln had been tested for lead, and the answer was always no, and then someone else would buy it within the week. Two sellers allowed me to test for lead, and both times were positive, which makes me think it's probably a pretty common problem in older kilns. It really makes me wonder how many people are selling work, often labeled as food-safe, that's been fired in a contaminated kiln. That's probably not as detrimental to your health as being around the firing fumes, but still...

Hey there--brand new to the forum, so I hope I'm posting this in the right place. For months now I've been looking for a kiln that won't bankrupt me, and a while back I found an old EconoKiln for sale in my city. It was an old model (maybe the j18x, if I remember right), but beautiful inside, looked almost new. However, I've been very cautious about the potential presence of lead in older kilns, so I brought a lead test kit and the brick of this kiln tested positive right away. I passed on it very reluctantly, but I'm wondering if I was just being paranoid? I see people snapping up ancient kilns all the time, and I have to assume that many of them were used to fire lead glazes. Is the lead thing just not that big of a deal, or are my fellow hobby potters unaware that it's an issue? I'm probably just going to bite the bullet and buy a new Skutt so I can stop agonizing over every manual kiln that crops up on FB marketplace, but I wanted to see what y'all thought about the lead issue first.