Door Refresh in 3 Acts

After scraping and grinding off all the deteriorated surface of the softbrick, I rolled on an 80/20 mix of EPK & silica, at a heavy-cream consistency. This is supposed to prevent (or slow down) further deterioration. I'll let you know how it works! 

 

Kiln Maintenance, the Soda/Salt edition

You might remember my kiln was rebuilt in 2021. Tyler Gulden did the brainwork on this! I highly recommend his services if you are planning a kiln of your own - Tyler has forgotten more about kilns than most people will ever know. 

One of the features of my new kiln is a door on a pivot hinge. I still get a little joy-zing when I place the last conepack & realize I don't have to brick the door - just swing it shut! That door had to be built of IFB, as hardbrick would be too heavy for the hinge. 

As you may know, soda vapor is very destructive to softbrick. We had to brush a coating on the brick to protect it, or else the door would have fallen apart very quickly. It's time to replace that coating, as the softbrick is beginning to spall, which is bad just because I don't want to have to replace it, and also because the resulting debris can ruin ware. 

To clean this up, I use a curry brush - originally intended for grooming horses. I'll remove all the loose crumbles until I get down the solid brick, and then brush on an 80/20 mixture of kaolin & silica. That recipe also came from Tyler - I was surprised to see silica in it, because I assumed we wouldn't want to give the soda vapor anything to react with, but apparently once it glasses over, it protects the brick underneath. 

Like this: 

Like a lot of kiln maintenance, it's not my favorite job, but I can get kind of Zen about it. There's something satisfying about seeing the degraded brick slowly give way to solid material. Even boring jobs can bring the dopamine! 

Anyway, enough yapping about it, time to go do it. Oh and let me toss in, consider subscribing to my Patreon page! There's a free option, & paid options start at $1.50/month. Thanks! XO

Burning Question

So, a weird thing happened this morning. 
I candled my bisque overnight, but when I came out in the morning to turn on the burners proper, I found flame coming out of the primary air intake of the pilot. I had never seen this before & immediately turned off the gas - that's kinda my go-to move whenever anything unexpected is happening with the propane. I wish I had taken a photo to illustrate this post, but oh well. Probably anyone who would know the answer already knows what the primary air intake looks like.

The only difference I could observe between the pilot that was behaving normally & the one that was doing this unusual thing was the primary air intake was open a little wider on the odd one. That one was also a little harder to light last night. I don't remember opening or closing either of them but who knows? 

I spun the disk to close the intake a little more, so it matched the other, then re-lit the pilots. Nothing unusual happened after an hour, so I went ahead & lit the burners. 

Anybody have any ideas why that happened? I'm not gonna blow myself up, right?

It's Always Something

 The painters finished our house this week - I have been wanting to get this done for 10 years! 15, really, but 10 years ago I did as much as I could myself, and then just had to tolerate being the junky-looking house on our street. Painters cost money! & rightfully so; it's a shit-ton of work, and people deserve to be paid for work. Anyway it's finally done, & we are delighted with the results.

Next on the list is, of course, the kiln rebuild. Tyler stopped by yesterday to take some measurements & assess how much brick from the existing kiln could be reused. In the meantime I am working on one last firing cycle before the big teardown. Loading a bisque today & firing tomorrow... 

...only slightly hindered by my broken toe.

Yep, I'm hobbling. I stubbed it hard on a rock, and it blew up & turned purple. It can be hard to know if a toe is actually broken or just bruised but a friend who works as an ER doc saw a photo I posted on social media & called it: "That is definitely broken." 

Not that it matters; the treatment is the same. Buddy-tape it to the toe beside it, and stay off it. LOL, as if that is an option. I can put off gardening & housecleaning, but I have classes to teach & a kiln to load, so putting my feet up & eating bon-bons is just not in the cards. 

My poor little toe!

 It's always something, isn't it? One damn thing after another. But I like to keep in mind: if that's my worst problem, there are no problems. 

Anyway! Off to load my bisque. I'll do a little bit, and then take a break if the toe starts to throb. 

If you'd like to pre-order a mug from the first firing of the new kiln, you can do that here. The rebuild is happening one way or another, but pre-orders will help pay for it. 

IT'S ON: KILN REBUILD 2021

Some of you have been readers of this blog for a loooong time - maybe you remember that time I built a soda kiln in my backyard. That kiln has served me well, but now it's time for an upgrade. 

11 years is not a ridiculously short life for a kiln, and it is true that soda is harder on brick than salt is. Nevertheless, this kiln would have lasted longer if I had chosen a heavier gauge of angle iron for the exoskeleton. I'm very glad I had the experience of building it myself, but I found when I contemplated the rebuild I was just dreading it. UGH LIFTING HEAVY THINGS UGH BRICK DUST IN MY EYES 

I knew it would take me most of the summer - time that I would much rather spend making pots. With that in mind, I decided to call in an expert: Tyler Gulden. In addition to making pots & teaching at Bates College, Tyler is a master kiln builder! You can see a few of the projects he has worked on here. 

Worked with Tyler at the Watershed Center for Ceramic Arts, back in 2006, & we've been friends for years. Every time someone tells me they want to build a kiln, I send them his way, because not only is he the best - this is not a glow up, he really is - but his rates are crazy low, compared to other kiln builders. 

So excited about this kiln! It will be modelled on the soda kiln at Watershed, with some adjustments necessary for the different fuel & pressure. The stacking space will be almost twice that of my current kiln, and - the very best upgrade of all - the door will be on a hinge. You know that feeling when you're like WOO-HOO, DONE LOADING followed immediately by oh crap still gotta brick up? Yeah well that's all over for me (after these next 2 firings, at least.) The additional cost is pretty minimal - about half a day of labor - and when you factor in the cost of replacing broken door brick & the time mixing door mud, bricking & mudding up every time - it is more than a bargain. 

Here's the kiln design it will be based on. Now imagine a sliding-hinge door!

In the meantime, I am squeezing out two more firings before deconstruction begins. Tine to get making! 

Yeah so...

 ...my bubble of energy last week? Got abruptly popped when a rightwing mob invaded the US capitol, intent on killing the Vice President and the Speaker of the House. I thought I was back, but no. My productivity is the least of the problems with this, of course, but THANKS ALOT, RIGHTWING MOB. I saw a post on social media asking something like, "Am I the only one having trouble focusing on anything other than the deadly pandemic and the imminent threat to democracy?" No, anonymous poster; no you are not. It's wreaking holy ol' havoc with my professional life. 

If everything really does have an equal and opposite reaction I am about to have my most amazing year yet - as is America. 

Anyway. 

I finally got the kiln loaded - a little loose, but I often get better pots that way. I went to candle the load but discovered that I need new thermocouples (well - I knew that. I kept putting it off, & now one of them doesn't work at all) and the burners are loud & flame more orange than blue - the burners need a good scrub with a wire brush. Thermocouples are easy to replace, and burners are easy to scrub, but it does mean the kiln is still not firing! Luckily nobody is waiting for these pots...yet. 

My list today:

• Order three 36" thermocouples
• Take burners apart & clean them
• Pray for America

Procrastination Energy

 

I haven't fired as often this year as other years, because obviously. I am gearing up to do a glaze firing soon, though, and for weeks have been putting off grinding my kiln shelves. I enjoy nearly every aspect of #claylife - even stuff like mixing glazes, although it took years to appreciate the calm zone of concentration that requires - but I can't really feel the love for kiln maintenance, so I put it off. And put it off, and put it off. 

So I don't feel guilty for not doing the dreary job that I know needs to be done, I do every damn thing else. I can get a crazy-lot of stuff done when I am procrastinating kiln shelves! I built websites & took photos, posted items online, packed & shipped orders, raked my lawn, cleaned my house like crazy, even applied to refinance my mortgage. Anything, anything other than grinding kiln shelves!

Which is silly. So today I put on my big-girl pants & did the deed. The whole thing took less than an hour, and I was extra thorough! Will I remember that it's really no big deal, next time? 

Probably not. 

Jacked Up

OMG I think this is going to work...sort of, anyway.
I propped the arch for on four jackposts, high enough to lift the weight of the arch from the walls. This allowed me to straighten the walls a little and pop in the fallen brick. I couldn't completely correct the spread tho - I'd need to pull down the walls for that. I might do that next summer but for now I need to get this kiln working again - I have orders to complete. So! Because the walls had spread, there was an inch & a half gap in the front ring of the arch, and a much narrower wedge of gap in the second ring.

Solution? Castable.

On the suggestion of my friend Tyler Gulden - let me here put in a 100% sincere plug for him: if you have a few bucks to hire your kiln built, he's the guy you want, and his services are affordable to the point of ridiculous!Anyway, on his suggestion I got a commercially produce high-alumina castble product called Noxcast 32, durable to 3200°F and non-reactive to soda. When I do my someday-rebuild, I am going to line the interior of the kiln with this stuff!

It comes in a 50 lb bag - way more than I need but whatev - and cost about 50 bucks. If it works it'll still be a bargain!

I needed it not to stick to the wooden arch form, so I melted paraffin wax & poured it into the gap, then heavily applied cooking spray. I mixed the castble into a thick-but-pourable consistency, then scooped & dribbled it between the brick until the space was filled.


 It will need to set overnight but by tomorrow AM I should know if we are good to go!

It's Fine, I'm Sure It's Fine

That's what I keep telling myself, but I'm not sure I 100% believe it.  Like a lot of repairs, the kiln has to get worse before it can get better, freaking me out a little bit every step of the way. I had to (of course, but still) remove some of the brick around the doorway in order that the arch form fit in, and though I was pretty careful to stack the brick exactly as they were in the doorway part of me wonders if I will be able to put them back correctly. Half-assedness is so ingrained in my nature that even when I try to be meticulous a fair amount of half-assery slips in.

It doesn't help that I am making this up as I go along. The Kiln Book covers building an arch but not repairing one without taking the whole thing down & starting again. My consolation is, if this doesn't work, taking it down & starting again is always an option.

It's clearer than ever how much the walls have spread. Note to self & all other kiln builders: next time, make holes for two tie rods: when one breaks, the other will hold long enough to replace the broken one. Just think, for the 5 minutes it would have taken to drill 2 additional holes I could have avoided all this work, if not forever, at least for several years.

I've now completed the easy part...now to figure out how to jack up the form under the brick. It may be that my plan to support the center, just enough to pop in the missing brick, will need revisiting; possibly there is no way to do this without pushing up the whole arch. Right now the plan is to use a pair of jack posts to hold the form in place while I do the repair. Will let you know how it goes.

Progress in Progress

Did I mention I hate kiln building in all its forms? But I do love me some feeling of accomplishment. I've had to break down the task of repairing my arch into extremely tiny baby steps - re-read the chapter, take the measurements, look up the table, buy the plywood, and so on - which is my strategy for dealing with jobs that I dread doing. After enough steps are done the job begins to gain some momentum, and working on it gets easier.

So it is with my arch form! The form is built, and now I need to get some 2 x 4s to prop it up under the remaining bricks of the arch.

Baby steps are all fine and good, but there is some time pressure here - it's almost June & stores are waiting on their summer orders. When I get tired of the whine of the saw & the thunk of the hammer, I retreat to the summer studio to throw. I estimate the repair will be completed by the end of the holiday weekend, and I hope to have enough to fill a bisque shortly after.

My Bricks are Numbered

I build my kiln in 2010; not the first kiln I've ever built, but the first one that I've been the brains of the operation. I love every aspect of making pottery - the wetwork, obvs, that's easy to love, but also glazing and loading and firing. I even love mixing glazes, in a way: the methodical concentration necessary creates almost a meditative state that shuts down the shouting of the world. Somehow I have never come to love kiln building and maintenance! Maybe I just haven't done enough of it. That's what I tell my students when they tell me they don't like pulling handles (and I am right.)

Possibly about to put a few more hours of kiln building experience under my belt. For several weeks I approached my flattened-arch situation by walking out every day & staring at the loose bricks for a while and then going back in the house. Finally I decided to grab a mallet & try to tap the bricks back into place. I didn't actually think it would work - they dropped for a reason - but I knew it would either a) work or b) cause the loose bricks to fall, thus ending the endless indecision over whether I really needed to go through the whole tiresome business of building an arch form.

The answer, of course, is yes, yes I do need to go through the whole tiresome business, and at least I have got that clear now so I can begin.

Since I sort of expected this result - that the bricks would fall - I put some scrap insulating foam board inside the kiln, so they would hit the floor and break. As you can see, I have numbered the remaining brick so I can just put them back where they were - they aren't all the same, some are #1 arch brick, some are #2 [insert extremely childish LOL here], and some are straights. I don't want to have to figure it all out again, so I went to work with my trusty sharpie marker.

As you can see, it's a bonded arch, so entire sections don't fall if one brick gets loose

This job still seems intimidating, despite the helpful numeration, and the fact that I built this arch in the first place, so I need to break it down to baby steps:

1. Measure span & rise...or I may have those values in an old blog post. 
2. Do the math to arrive at the radius of the imaginary circle this arch would inscribe were it continued. 
3. Get plywood & slats
4. Draw the necessary fraction of the imaginary circle on the plywood, twice
5. Cut 2 slats the depth of the interior of the kiln, and screw the plywood to the slats to properly space the arch supports
6. Attach slats between the plywood forms, along the curve
7. Profit!
8. No wait
9. Ugh that's enough for one day

So, that's my to-do list for tomorrow! Fun City.

Anything But

There exists a thing that I call "procrastination energy." I get a boatload of stuff done when I am trying to avoid an unfavorite task. Here's me doing literally anything but starting on my kiln repairs:

OH LOOK WE'RE OUT OF LIP BALM! Can't have that [makes lip balm]

GETTIN CLOSE TO VALENTINE'S DAY I COULD SURE USE THE TWENTY TWO BUCKS I MAKE IF I SELL EVERY BAR OF A BATCH OF SOAP....[makes three batches]

OH MY THE RUG IS LOOKIN A LITTLE DINGY...[shampoos rug]

It's not quite true that I haven't even started; I replaced the threaded rod so at least it can't get any worse, while I am getting around to it. I brought my castable bricks inside and repaired the breaks in them with a high temp air-set mortar called Quickbond 3000. I had to do this a few years ago, and  I wrote a blog post about it then, too. I thought I had, and when I found it, I was amused at the difference in how the brick look! Though they are somewhat resistant to soda, they acquire some every firing...enough to make them look like there's lichen growing on them, after 7 years in service. The white steaks on the bricks are old repairs; the grey ones are the new. Sticking them back together is tiresome and messy but not at all difficult, and they will be ready to use in a few days - not that I'll be ready to fire in a few days! I still have to tend to my sagging arch.

Oh, btw, here's a link to that soap, if you're interested!

Uh-oh

Wouldn't you just know it? I feel like after 7 years together, this kiln & have have just hit out groove - I was getting good firings (almost) every time, coming in under 11 hours, good color, even soda...but when I went to unload this last firing, I see that one of the threaded rods that holds the angle iron skeleton together has rusted through.

The others are still in good shape - this was the one right over the door, so it got some heat and some soda every firing. Since it has broken, the walls have leaned outward somewhat, so simply replacing the rod is not really an option. Looks like I am going to have to take down the arch, and the two side walls, at a minimum- and if I am doing that I might as well re-do the back wall as well so I can replace the angle iron with a thicker gauge.

Even though this rebuild was not entirely unexpected, and even though mid-January is, business-wise, not a terrible time for it to happen, allow me to say: Damn it! Damn it! Damn it!

In other news, Sylvester - the kitty whose adoption fee we fully sponsored with the cat dish fundraiser - was adopted last weekend! I had hoped to do another cat dish fundraiser in a few weeks but of course the kiln rebuild is going to bump everything back.

At least the order I had in this firing looks good. I'm gonna need that $$.

And again I say, damn it.

Notes of a Mundane Nature

I almost typed "Notes of a Mudane Nature," which would have been sort of appropriate.

After much rumination ('cause that's what I do), I have started using SquaredUp as my retail page. I like the look of the custom-built shopping page better but it's so much quicker to just upload photos & write descriptions to the pre-made store that I went with that, for now. I've got enough on my to-do list without always doing everything the hard way. I went for months with nothing in the online store because I couldn't find the time to do it all.
I do still find SquaredUp confusing from the admin point of view (there's the admin page, and the editor page, and the dashboard page...which all do different things...OTOH you can easily create discount codes, which is a thing I wanted to do but couldn't through my paypal links. Here, I'll go ahead & do one for you guys: type in BLOG BUDDY in the promo code box if you make a purchase, and get 10% off!)  It's very easy to shop from, and - for no reason that I can see - my sales have been better than when I was custom building each page. There's more than one factor involved there, to be sure - this was after the long spell of nothing available online, so there may have been some pent-up demand; I think I got better at writing descriptions; my Facebook and Twitter audiences are larger; and so on. So I can't say SquaredUp is necessarily the cause of the improvement, but I am feeling a little bit superstitious about it now.

Even though I know superstition is bullshit.

[knocks wood.]

Now I just have to track down everywhere that I have a link to my shopping page and make sure to replace it with the new link.

Other notes:

It's spring, going into summer, which means I have a little more money than I sometimes do, which unfortunately does not mean I will be eating fancy chow and drinking fancy wine, or even buying a cool pair of steampunk boots. Lumber for new raised beds in the garden and an upcycled-bureau-turned-kitchen-island are more likely. In addition, some less exciting purchases are in my near future, it seems:

Thing one: Boxes, packing peanuts, newsprint and rolls of corrugated cardboard. I've located a new supplier to replace Uline, and they are local! Local is always a plus. I need to top up packing materials. EAB, Inc is located in Lewiston, about 5 miles from INFAB Refractories, where I get brick inswool and refractory cement for kiln maintenance. Which brings us to thing two: I probably need to get some wool, and some softbrick to spiffy up the kiln a bit, tighten the door and the spies, etc.

Thing three: This damn burner.

Would you look at that crack? How does that even happen, unless being a million years old is cause enough? Obviously all firing is off until I get this fixed. I've got a call into a welder near me, he has to look at it to know if he can fix it, if not, a new burner sleeve is on my shopping list. 😕 I'd much rather have a pair of steampunk boots.

Better Be Today

Today, a Sunday, is the last day above freezing predicted in Central Maine for quite some time, so I guess I better get as much of my kiln maintenance done today as possible, or be cursing myself out in the bitter cold. My to-do list today looks like this:

1. Prepare kiln for firing

• Clean out burner channels
• Grind shelves
• Rebuild bag walls

2. Mix Wadding
3. Make Cone packs
4. Postcards to Senators
5. Handles on mugs
6. Cat flea treatment

Sounds like fun, right? (If you said "NO," you are today's winner!) As you can see above, the wood curls method of soda application makes a much bigger mess than the spray-in method. The kiln fires better if I pull down the bag walls in between every glaze firing and clear out the channels. I am considering switching for this reason alone, but I hate to give up the pronounced directionality and rivers of soda that I get from the wood curls. So, I dunno. 

Beauty is where you find it. Just look at these bag wall bricks! Maybe I will save them for garden edging, and rebuild the bag wall with new brick. Which will necessitate a trip to the Dirty Lew and INFAB Refractories. Which may or may not have Superduty hardbrick. And aren't open Sunday. Ugh, maybe I'll just keep it simple. 

Anyway! I'm wasting daylight, so catch ya later.

UPDATE: The channels are cleared, the bag walls rebuilt, the shelves are ground, the wadding is mixed! Not a moment too soon, either - snowflakes have just started flying. Doug took care of the flea treatments, so that just leaves postcards and cone packs. And it's not even 2 o'clock! 

Sunday Basics

I've been noticing ceramic supply house selling "kiln wash" like it's some mystery material, like the secret sauce on Big Macs.

Pretty sure the secret sauce is just thousand island dressing, and I'm positive that kiln wash is just this:

50% Kaolin
50% Alumina Hydrate
by weight. Or actually by volume will work, too - it's not that fussy.

For the professional potters among my readers - I know you already know this. I also have readers who are students or beginners, and I hate to see them wasting money on something so simple. If it's just you, mix it about the thickness of milk; if you are in a teaching studio, mix it more like heavy cream - students have a lot of glazing mishaps. Mix it yourself, and save your money for wonderful things like new ribs, or whoopie pies, or Bailey's Irish Cream, or whatever it is that makes you happy.

Straight Up

Looka that stack! That stack is straight as...straight as...well, straight as a thing that's really, really straight. Better than last time, anyway.

Right now the kiln is cooling; first glaze fire with new stack went without incident. Not that I expected an incident: if the dimensions are the same as the old stack, there's no reason why it would fire any differently. But kilns are weird.  And the dimensions are not precisely like the old one: the new stack is one layer shorter, because previously the kiln always drew a little too hard. Not enough to get up on the roof and fix it ( I HATE HEIGHTS) but since I had to rebuild it anyway....

The firing was a little slower than I expected; which might have been a function of the weather - kinda windy - or the changes in the stack. And the damper positions are noticeably different now: I have to push the damper further in to achieve the same reduction. Possibly, in building the stack straighter, I created a slightly larger cross-section? Dunno. Don't care, actually, expect abstractly, as long as I get good results.
...which I shall know soon! I pulled the spy to peek, and not only do things look good - what little I could see - but it seems cool enough to unload. So I'm off to do just that.

On Second Thought...

While scraping and grinding kiln shelves, I turned on a burner to melt the snow out of the kiln. I bricked up the door to hold the heat in a bit, so the burner could do its job; and in doing so I was reminded: my castable blocks are in rough shape.

I've got a pail of refractory cement right here, and a trowel; I guess now is as good a time as any to make these repairs. It feels like I just did this, but actually it's been three years or so. It's gritty messy work, but kind of satisfying in a way. Leaves me feeling like I dun good. And bricking up will be so much easier when its done.

Since I am doing gritty messy work today, I might as well add "mix up door mud" to the list.

It doesn't change my firing schedule, because I can squeeze loading, candling, and firing the bisque into one day if necessary.

ETA: Yeahno. It's 10 degrees outside; if I wait until Wednesday I can load in 46 degrees. Call me a big baby, but I'm holding off.