Tuesday, February 9, 2010

kiln buildin'

I haven't made any pots in awhile and I'm completely out of clay. I've been wanting to mix some but we've been having lots of rain and below freezing days and I don't care to blunge clay outside in that kind of weather!

My kiln building course meets at 8am twice a week and we've been rained out of our build the last 3 class periods so I bought 2 huge tarps and covered the area so we can keep going. Wouldn't you know it today we had sunny skies but at 8am it was about 24 degrees. So being the slave driver that I am I made them work anyways. We accomplished quite a bit between the four of us(only 3 out of 4 showed up today.) On friday afternoon we snapped chalk lines, ground down high spots in the slab and laid the concrete block. Yesterday I spent time laying a cement board base and mortaring the first course to level(the slab's on a pitch of course.) So here's what we accomplished in freezing weather today:


Here's the temporary brickyard and our classy tarps. The backside of the kiln area backs up to one of the main roads on campus, so I'm just waiting for a complaint. The car kiln is under the tarped area, the salt kiln will be built underneath the hole in the roof.



Well, that's all for now. I'm tired. It's dinner time and we're having burgers from the Beehive, come visit and we'll take you there, some of the best food I've ever put in my mouth. It's LOST night, so I'm off!

Cheers!

5 comments:

Ron said...

Kiln's looking good. A burger sounds great! Hummm, maybe lunch tomorrow.

Sue Pariseau Pottery said...

Good progress made inspite of bad weather. They must be hard workers.

Anonymous said...

thanks for posting brandon. are those two different types of fire brick?

brandon phillips said...

there are actually three different grades of brick. i'm using high duty hardbrick for the burner ports/flu, on the corners where the car meets the wall and in the flame path, because of it's durability. The interior walls from there on up will be 2600 degree insulating brick and it is backed by 2300 insulating brick.

since it's a student kiln that will take a fair amount of abuse and maintenance will be almost non-existent i'm trying to make it as durable as possible without sacrificing efficiency.

MattyT said...

The kiln looks good. I just fired a small redux kiln that I built today and got it up to 10 all around in the first firing!