D Bouchette on mon 19 mar 01
If I hadn't been painting the studio floor, I might have never noticed. My
Skutt 1027-PK *moved* in the Olympia, WA earthquake (I'm in northern
Oregon)! First I noticed that the top three rings, still perfectly
aligned, weren't aligned with the floor of the kiln.
That was about a week ago.
Then yesterday as I got closer to the "we gotta move the kiln to paint
under it," I noticed that the kiln wasn't squarely on the outside steel
support. This Skutt has two sets of steel legs, each square, and one fits
loosely inside the other. So you end up with 8 legs under the kiln. One
corner of the outside set of legs was showing about 3/4" beyond the bottom
of the kiln, which, in another spot, was a good 1" out of vertical with the
rest of the kiln above it.
I had packed the kiln completely full for building the studio around
it: all shelves, posts, stilts, cone packs, tile setters, and bisque ware
went in it. It was up to the brim. As I unpacked it, I was amazed that
the posts and shelves had stayed with the bottom, which had moved one way,
and the shelves were 1/8" to 1/4" away from one wall of the top three
rings, which had moved in another way. Nothing fell over!
Tonight on the news they reported that Seattle moved south in this
earthquake (normally it moves north). Actually, different parts of it
moved in different directions; the university took a bunch of
measurements. They said that in a couple of years it would actually
gradually move back to where it was. But at the quake's epicenter
underground, they figured the earth moved more than three feet.
Lucky my kiln only moved an inch this way and an inch that. Outside some
of the bricks on the base of my soon-to-be-first gas kiln moved a bit, but
the cement blocks below them didn't.
All you Pacific Northwesterners might want to check your electric
kilns.... The power of Father Nature and Mother Time! (equality...)
deb
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