John McGie on wed 17 jul 96
Just wondering if anyone else has been down this road.
We've been putting it off for some time, but are now pretty much forced to
look at repairing the door on our ancient and well used 35 cu. ft. Alpine kiln.
The bricks have cracked and are slowly but surely walking out to a point of
no return. Has anyone else done a fix on these doors? If so did you do
anything other than simply pulling out the old bricks and re-cementing them
in? I'm wondering about using other materials such as insulating block,
castable, etc.
Thanks for any and all ideas.
John McGie
#25 Hazel Street
Sherwood Park, Alberta
Canada
T8A 1H7
jmcgie@gpu.srv.ualberta.ca
Joshua Green on wed 17 jul 96
John,
We rebuilt the door to a similar Alpine 3 or so years ago and it seems
to be holding up well under almost weekly cone 10 firings. Upon tearing
out the old brick we found that there was a length of steel bar
approximately .5 in. dia. threaded mid-way through every fifth or so
course and welded to edges of the door frame. We conconstructed this
solution by using threaded rod of a similar diameter. This involved
drilling a hole through the edge of the door frame alligned with the
opening edge of the door jamb, and welding a nut to the inside of the
door frame along the hinged edge to recive the rod. Of course this
means that every brick used in this course was drilled out to allow the
rod to pass through.
If memory serves me correctly we also used 1" of fiber cut into approx.
10" squares behind the brick. Our thinking was to add some extra
insulation behind brick joints at they would otherwise extend directly
to the door's steel face plate. Finally we used this same fiber
application on the brick face of the door as it seemed apparent that all
those cracks appearing in your door now may be warping the steel bars in
the original design. This same approach also seems to be holding up well
on a 60 cu. ft. kiln.
Of course, you should probably also call Alpine for any recommendations
they may have.
Good luck,
Josh
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