Monday, October 3, 2011

Countdown.

This weekend I cleaned out the kiln, ground and washed the shelves and posts and loaded that sucker up.  The tentative plan is to fire on Friday.  We'll see how that goes, I've got some firewood issues to work out.  On Saturday I received a call from one of my wholesale accounts with a reorder they need by the end of the month.  My dilemma then(with half the kiln already loaded) was to hold off and make the remainder of pots needed for their order and then fire OR go ahead and fire now then turn around and do another one.  The order will take up about 1/3 of the kiln and I've got a big show coming up at the end of the month for which I'm out of lots of things so I elected to do two firings.  I do have extra pots, though I may have to find a few people to put some pots in the second firing.  This means that after these two I probably won't be firing again until the winter break. 

The cleaned out kiln...waiting on pots.

The back 2 stacks.

The front stack.  I had a lot of shorter pots this go around, a record 36 shelves in this firing...that's probably going to amount to a bit of a longer firing.

A few weeks ago I was searching around on the web for an alternative way to strip pallets(my wood sources have steadily been drying up.)  I currently use a reciprocating saw, which works but is tiresome.  I found a nifty modified nailgun that just shoots the nails through the slat...awesome!  But $400.  I though about modifying a used one but I'd still be ponying up a couple hundred dollars and I don't know if my compressor could keep up with that.  Then I found this brilliant chap in the UK who came up with this giant prybar.  Genius, work smarter, not harder.  Since this would be too cost prohibitive to import from the UK(I'd totally pay for this) I made my own from scrap lying around the school.  I'll have to make another because the 1/4" steel won't last, it likes to bend.  The oak pallets are a bit harder to seperate than pine but I think this will work.  It does get problematic when you only have a couple slats left but...I'll figure something out.

While loading the kiln I found this gal on one of the door bricks I picked up.  Gah!

Cheers!

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

That pry bar reminds me of a commercial one I bought a few years ago to pry up boards on my deck. It's called the Duckbill Deck Wrecker and you can buy it for about 50 bucks. Works great.

ang design said...

I'd be more than happy to help ya fill the kiln :P have a super wkd firing!!!