THE ORIGINAL DECISION WAS THAT BY THE END OF THIS WEEKEND THERE WOULD BE A CAKE MACHINE BUILT
MUCH ENTHUSIASM IS NEEDED
I AM SO ENTHUSIASTIC I CANNOT TURN OFF CAPSLOCK
Okay, enough of that. Here's the documentation.
Day 1: Saturday
Saturday began with Raymond driving over with a George Foreman desktop rotisserie. We had determined the night prior that finishing the full-size cake oven would definitively be impossible, as we had yet to find a satisfying balance of light weight, low cost, and sufficient strength. We settled for making a smaller oven using a readily available rotisserie assembly—as a prototype, mind you, and nothing else—and perhaps a tiny cake.
It looks like a cheap temperature sensor, but hey, it goes all the way to 300°C (571°F) which is great for an application where the optimum temperature is 240-260°C (464-500°F). Oh geez it's displaying Fahrenheit whoops how did that happen.
Tinsnips! This is to make a hole for the temperature sensor.
Pieces folded back, hole punched with an awl.
Hmmm...
Well, let's see what's inside.
Oh hey look at that, the oven's reassembled! It's all ready to go and we can see at what temperature the rotisserie peaks. If we can easily get it up to 250°C, we are good!
Oh geez it's still reading Fahrenheit.
The oven peaked around 207°C (405°F), which is NOT YET HOT ENOUGH.
Well, if we can fit another heating element in there, it should get to 250°C just fine, right? Raymond shows me that bending a heating element (such as the one in the bottom right corner of this picture) shorts it out and renders it useless. My bad. I guess we need something more compact...
The solution is more George Foreman! $5 and a quick trip down the block lands us the Lean Mean Something Something.
Here it's been gutted and the heating elements extracted.
These compact little guys will be mounted, one on each side wall of the oven. Did that make sense? I mean here:
...and here:
To fasten them on, we create little aluminium brackets which will be screwed onto the sides shown above.
Side view of bracket.
At this point, it was kind of late and time for Raymond to depart. And neither of us will have much time for cake weekend on Sunday, so it looks like cake weekend is a bust. Well, significant progress was made, I guess. Good thing I still have half a store-bought 'kuchen in the fridge.
Partial success!
Things to remember for next time
- Raymond. Dude. Check your tyre pressure.
- That's about it, really. The rest of this is more or less flyin' blind with no preparations.
