Spring looks to be arriving...
What you're seeing here, folks, is the last remaining piece of snow on our property. Of course the weatherman this morning said there was a chance of snow this weekend. We are going to pretend we didn't hear that.Loading is going smoothly. The first chamber is all done. We don't have too many pots this firing so we are trying out a different stacking arrangement in the first chamber, with only one real stack of shelves. This allows us twice as much space to place large pots on the floor of the kiln right in front of the firebox. Hopefully building up some good embers and ash on them.
We also rebuilt the bagwall of the second chamber:
It's a fairly tall bagwall and we've been having trouble with it moving toward the firebox each firing. So we are bracing it against the arch this time. Hopefully this will work out well. We did lower the bagwall a few rows to accommodate for the added resistance of the "support" bricks. There is also a row on top of the support bricks to hold it all together as you can see here:
We're just firing the first two chambers this time. Almost done loading... we'll candle tonight and finish up late Friday afternoon/evening.Joe
4 comments:
Looking good Joe, I hope you all have a great firing. At first I thought those shelves were doubled up, then I clicked and saw they are made that way with the edge.
Good luck with the firing. I notice you use wadding on the stilts but don't see any on the pots. Or do I not see things correctly?
Ron,
the shelves are 1 1/2" thick and have funny lips on the edges... I guess you get what you pay for.
Michael,
In the first chamber we wad stilts and pots, but in the second and third chamber we don't get as much ash. We put down a little silica sand on top of the shelves and then place the pots on the sand. It really speeds things up in comparison to wadding everything, though we still do wad some lids depending on the situation. You do have to be careful not to drop any sand inside bowls on the lower shelves. We've learned that lesson the hard way a couple of times.
Joe
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