Skilletron 2.0 is nearly reading to start cranking out skillets. As you can see in the videos below, the main construction is finished, and the furnace certainly burns the dickens out of whatever gets in its greedy little mouth. We had hoped to begin pouring bottle openers on Labor Day. After having to build a new awning to block the rain, we discovered that the waste vegetable oil is just not burning as efficiently as it should. In short, we have to improve combustion by pre-heating the vegetable oil and atomizing the fuel better. It does put us several days behind our production schedule, but we built an experimental waste vegetable oil fueled furnace, a few adjustments here and there are going to happen. Once those changes get made over the next week, we are all set to pour iron!

More exciting news, if anyone is close to the Syracuse area, we will be doing public pouring at the Farmer’s Market on Saturdays. Keep an eye on the website for dates starting later this month.
Add as an added bonus, a video of our sand muller mulling:

Over the weekend we took some skillets, some friends, and a canoe to Hunter Lake, NY for a little R & R before diving headlong into final push building the new foundry. The trip also gave us the opportunity to try out the skillets over a campfire. Not only were the fish perfectly cooked, they looked good cookin’. Check more pictures from the trip after the link.

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We’re pleased to announce that our Frying Skillets was honored in the First Annual Core77 Design Awards with a ‘Notable’ in the Products/Equipment category. It’s exciting to be included in such an amazing bunch of winners, check them all out here. You can see our entire entry on the Core77 site, including a short video with John showing off the skillet.  The judges had a lot of great things to say about our skillet but our favorite quote might be from Rama Chorpash, “Perhaps this is the start of a second Iron Age?” We hope so, Rama. Read more about the Awards after the break.

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It’s been an awesome month watching support pour in from all across the internet. Designers, foodies, chefs, beer lovers, iron groupies, friends and family, thank you all SO MUCH for backing our business. An extra special thank you to J. Kenji Lopez-Alt at Serious Eats for the thorough (and glowing) review that no doubt had a huge impact on us reaching our goal. We overshot our goal by nearly $7,000!

Of course, now the real work begins. We’ve been prepping digital files, securing our new space, stockpiling scrap iron, building some parts of the foundry, and more. Soon (after a pesky 3 week wait while funds are transfered) we’ll start construction on our new iron furnace, aka Skilletron 2.0, create tooling for molds, and order a truck load of raw materials to start making our Kickstarter rewards. Our hope is to be fully up and running and ready for larger scale production in time for the holidays!

There will be plenty more updates to come as we build the foundry and start producing skillets. Again, we cannot thank our Kickstarter backers enough and we can’t wait to send out the first batch of skillets. Ok, we’re off to break up some scrap iron.

We would like to go ahead and give a BIG thank you to all of you who helped us reach our funding goal as of  June 23nd. We are very excited to get the chance to make all the rewards a.s.a.p., but keep spreading the word. 10 more days to get a pre-order in! We will be making all of the items for our Kickstarter backers before we begin to take orders for everyone else out there. The more backing we can get, the faster we can move on construction of Skilletron 2.0 (that’s the furnace’s name). We’ve got 10 days, let’s keep this momentum going!

To take our skillets from one-off tests to production we’re gonna need a bigger foundry. We’re turning to Kickstarter for funding and making our skillets available for pre-order for the first time. We’ve also created a few smaller iron pieces exclusively for the Kickstarter campaign. Check out the video and go order your skillets now at Kickstarter!

As we continue to alternately sprint and crawl toward full production of our cookware, we wanted to take a moment to update everyone. Plans, by their nature, tend to change. Our plans are no different. In order to find affordable and appropriate shop space for the studio, we are looking North. Our target is upstate NY, and we will be starting a remodel in the Syracuse area this spring. We are very excited to build this living/working space, and get down to business.

Very soon, you will have an opportunity to help us with the new studio. We are about to begin an online fundraising campaign to finance the build. In return for your investment, we will be offering very cool and exclusive items from the new shop. I promise, no Garrison Keillor coffee mugs.

We’ll close this update with some pictures of our fully functional prototypes. We have been playing with different seasonings including flax seed oil and good, old fashioned lard.

We’re happy to report that some BF prototypes will be a part of this awesome show highlighting south-eastern designers. Check it out if you’re in the area.

Ever since we exhibited our product design and company vision in New York, we have received a shower of interest from individuals and retailers alike. We would like to thank everyone who has shown interest and enthusiasm for our design and our goals. We feel it is important to keep everyone in the loop as our fledgling company starts to come to life, and to develop our manufacturing infrastructure honestly and transparently.

The original plan was to design and prototype our cookware in our own studio using our recycled iron method and work with other craftsmen to produce the bulk of the products. We were disheartened to find out, after calling almost every foundry in the U.S., that no one was interested in either our product or our process. Repeatedly, we were told that iron work of that scale is only done in China and India (Lodge still produces most of their lines domestically, here in Tennessee… way to go Lodge). Well, that is unacceptable to us.

So, we ask for patience as we begin to seek resources and design, what we believe to be, the first solar powered induction furnace. This will of course take time, but we are confident in this new manufacturing model. The catch is that using an induction style furnace requires raw pig iron and cannot use recycled iron. We are working with engineers to find a way to include post-consumer material, but even if we cannot achieve that goal the removal of coal from our foundry process is a massive move towards zero ecological impact.

Thank you for your patience, and we hope that you will all continue to follow us along as we prepare to make big changes in the way things are done in American industry. We hope all of your excitement and interest maintains over the next several months, and we look forward to everyone receiving the first line of Borough Furnace cookware.

Coolhunting.com did a nice little feature on us and some of our friends from the Young Designer’s Platform in NY. Check out what they have to say here.