We got the back wall up today, lot of brick cutting. The top part of the arch is a homemade castable and there are some soft brick in the arch that have been completely immersed in a homemade refractory coating...the kiln also is set up to potentially fire with a drip-feed waste oil system. We're experimenting with all kinds of crap on this kiln.
I was cutting hard bricks on our ghetto chop saw and the blade shattered and the shrapnel cut one of my fingers to the bone and a large piece flew very near to a students head. Yikes! Looks like I won't be making pots for a few days. It doesn't stop me from kiln building though. Thank goodness I have a "real" job, right?
I have some neat little lidded pieces that I'm fond of and I'll try to get a post up later.
Cheers!
7 comments:
E-gads! Flying fingers and parts, things are getting dangerous down there!! I've had chop saw blades explode and it scares the cr@p out of you, not to mention that the debri can shred anything in it's path!! Try Newskin on your finger...
far out you just scared me off using the angle grinder!..my blade is a lot smaller than that though...
Holy crap I had no idea your blade busted. Kenny Sedberry had a terrible accident in his kiln when his angle grinder blade shattered. It did some very serious damage to his head. Take care of that finger.
Sorry to hear about your finger... Maybe you mentioned it earlier in which case I appologize for not paying attention. Is this a wood/oil kiln for school? Also curious to hear about your homemade castable... what's in it, have you tried it before, does it harden when exposed to air or does it need to be hard fired like commercial castable. Hope you don't mind my comments always being full of questions. I'm a curious guy.
Joe
Joe-
It's a gas fired salt kiln for the univ. It has the ability to be adapted to oil. This kiln is entirely experimental, all built from salvaged/recycled brick. We're also building a custom homemade forced draft burner system for it as well. I can't remember the castable formula off the top of my head so I'll wait to post it until I know if works or not. It has fireclay, portland cement, alumina, grog and cushed firebrick in it. It hardens in a few days, no cracks. I'll do a post on it later after it's been fired...hopefully in a couple weeks.
The salt kiln is basically a scaled down version of my wood kiln. I'm pretty open with saying that I have ulterior motives with this kiln. I've wanted to adapt waste oil on my wood kiln but never wanted to experiment with that many pieces. So this is my guinea pig.
jeeze Brandon, that blade shattering and the shrapnel is my worst nightmare. I have always been afraid of power tools for just that reason - I've never trusted them. A first year requirement in the college I attended was a shop class that had a full assignment load that, once completed , had us use every piece of equipment in the very well appointed shop. That was my toughest course in my 4 years there because of my fear ! Hope you are healing well.
hey brandon how did the home made castable hold up??
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