Hello,
We got an old A-88B kiln from a friend and after a bit of cleaning, it fired right up. On the first try, we ran a bisque firing to cone 05 and a glaze firing to cone 6 successfully! An element broke sometime in the first firing so we replaced that. On our second bisque firing it seemed to be heating up alright (made it to about 350) but then sputtered out a couple of hours into the firing. It only functioned on High setting after that to any appreciable degree. Only the first and third elements out of four are turning red despite being on High. All elements are intact. Full power coming through the two hot lines all the way to the control box. Neutral and ground intact.
Aha! A wiring problem, I thought. But after triple checking our wiring with the old diagram and even switching a few things around, we could not get more than two elements firing. Still seems like this is a series/parallel switching issue, right?
Aha! A switch problem, I thought. Maybe? After taking apart the 4 way rotary switch, it did seem to barely/not reliably making all the connection changes. The plastic hub inside was quite worn down with very little throw. I did a little dremel work to increase the high:low ratio on the hub and after some careful bending of arms, I have the switch reliably switching again (or at least repaired from any damage I may have caused!)
I thought before I wire up and screw everything together for the third time, I might check for additional sage wisdom on repairing these. I'm on a crunch to not dissappoint my son and wife who are hoping to fire in just a couple days to make a weekend opportunity for their first sales.
Any advice is much appreciated for on things to check, to recheck, and common mistakes that I probably made! Thank you