grates and dampers

We hung the dampers today. The dampers are made of 1/4" steel. In Seagrove I used 1/2" steel and it worked well. Those dampers were smaller though and slide horizontally in the chimney. I did not want to hang 250lbs of steel from the rafter, that and 1/4" steel is about half the price of 1/2". The only concern with thinner steel is the possibility of the dampers warping. They are on pulleys and you can see the brick in the background is being used as a counter weight.
I might go back and change it so both dampers are operated from one side of the kiln, that certainly seems smarter. Hindsight is always 20/20. Luckily they are just bolted to the truss with a U-bolt, so I didn't have to drill through the bottom chord. I'ld hate to move them if I had drilled some holes through the truss for them.
I also cut the grate bricks. The local refractory company didn't have any 18" brick, so I had to purchase a 12"x24"x2.5" super duty tiles. It worked out well though as now we have 12" bricks left over from cutting the tile which we can use as posts when we load the kiln.
I also started to work on the grate system for the first chamber. I'll take pictures of that next time I get a chance to work on it.
We decided to start loading the kiln October 28th. That will give us four days to load. Considering how many pots we have to load it shouldn't really take that long. However since none of the bricks are cut for posts, nor are the blocks cut for the doors (we made the side door sized to fit the filled blocks since they are somewhat insulating, we just need to cut a bunch of half blocks), I'm sure we'll find some way to occupy ourselves if we finish loading early. Back to making pots.
Joe