GURUSHAKTI@AOL.COM on fri 4 aug 00
I just received some plans for a small soda/salt kiln that two people can
build in an hour and fire to cone 10 in three hours. You can get more
information from this New Zealand potters site at Rare Earth Pottery:
http://members.xoom.com/saltglazer/
For $5, he'll send you detailed plans for this little kiln. I wrote him and
he emailed me some sketches of the kiln and a home made diesel burner. For
simplicity, I plan on using my weed burner and propane. This little kiln is
small -- inner dimension of about 13 1/2X 23 1/2 inches and about 17 1/2 "
deep. It takes a single !2 X 18" kiln shelf (or two if your firing short
pots.) It will fire to cone 10 in three hours and he has built about 25 of
these kilns and says that the pots have the same quality as those fired in a
larger kiln with a prolonged firing. The same design principle can be applied
to a larger kiln with some modifications.
Basically, the burner port is at the chimney base, and the flame path runs
under the kiln shelf. There is a space left open at the other end permitting
the flame to be drawn up and back across the pots and into the flue and up
the 6 or 7' chimney. He shows it with hard bricks for the floor and the
chimney up to the top of the firebox, where you can then switch to other,
less heavy duty bricks. I'm going to use a flue liner for that upper chimney.
I plan to use insulating bricks for the body, coated with ITC 100, backed by
common red brick which I already have here. For a lid I'm going to use kiln
shelving with either insulating firebrick or fiber board on top. I've written
to a couple of places about the fiberboard and neither of them have gotten
back to me.
One thing is a bit of a puzzlement. He shows the side walls of the chamber as
being built with red bricks! The one time I inadvertently put a lower fired
brick in a cone 10 kiln, it melted and blocked a burner -- what a mess! Maybe
New Zealand red bricks are a different breed! :-)
Regards,
June (time to get back to glaze batching)
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