Eleanor on wed 3 sep 03
I was firing a large bisque load in my Skutt when the lights went
out. The KM had been set to Cone Fire ^04 Slow. When I checked the
kiln a few minutes before the outage, the temp. was about 1700F.
There was nothing in the Skutt manual about handling power outages,
so I called Skutt. The tech and I didn't realize at the time the
extent of the blackout; he advised to just turn the kiln back on and
the process would continue where it left off.
By the time power was restored, the kiln was nearly cool so instead
of restarting, I reprogrammed to ^04 Fast, figuring most of the
benefits of slow heating had been accomplished.
Unfortunately, as I trusted the KM to be reliable, there was no cone
pack in the kiln; I was using cones for glaze firing only -- bad move.
The pots looked fine. I glazed as usual--wiping down with a damp
cloth and using glazes which I had used before with success. No
problems with glaze application--the glazes stayed on the pots. There
were a couple of experiments included but only a couple. I fired two
loads to ^6 using a Ramp-hold schedule which was working for me and
cone packs in each load. The ^6 cone was properly bent at the end.
Major CRAWLING.Nearly every pot was ruined.
What happened? Was the bisque overfired? That's all I can think of.
Glazing procedure was the same as usual. What should I have done? In
the Archives there were references to indicate that outages should
not affect glaze firings, but evidently my firing was affected.
I'm very critical of my own work; there were several pots in this
load which I deemed "passable", maybe even "salable". I think I know
the answer, but I'll ask anyway: can these pots be saved?
Eleanor
Grumpy for a while, OK now.
Louis Katz on wed 3 sep 03
Consider the possibility that the two problems are unrelated. Maybe the
crawling was caused by something other than the power outage.I am sure
you will get other posts.
Good Luck,
Louis
On Wednesday, September 3, 2003, at 09:24 AM, Eleanor wrote:
> I was firing a large bisque load in my Skutt when the lights went
> out. The KM had been set to Cone Fire ^04 Slow. When I checked the
> kiln a few minutes before the outage, the temp. was about 1700F.
>
> There was nothing in the Skutt manual about handling power outages,
> so I called Skutt. The tech and I didn't realize at the time the
> extent of the blackout; he advised to just turn the kiln back on and
> the process would continue where it left off.
>
> By the time power was restored, the kiln was nearly cool so instead
> of restarting, I reprogrammed to ^04 Fast, figuring most of the
> benefits of slow heating had been accomplished.
>
> Unfortunately, as I trusted the KM to be reliable, there was no cone
> pack in the kiln; I was using cones for glaze firing only -- bad move.
>
> The pots looked fine. I glazed as usual--wiping down with a damp
> cloth and using glazes which I had used before with success. No
> problems with glaze application--the glazes stayed on the pots. There
> were a couple of experiments included but only a couple. I fired two
> loads to ^6 using a Ramp-hold schedule which was working for me and
> cone packs in each load. The ^6 cone was properly bent at the end.
>
> Major CRAWLING.Nearly every pot was ruined.
>
> What happened? Was the bisque overfired? That's all I can think of.
> Glazing procedure was the same as usual. What should I have done? In
> the Archives there were references to indicate that outages should
> not affect glaze firings, but evidently my firing was affected.
>
> I'm very critical of my own work; there were several pots in this
> load which I deemed "passable", maybe even "salable". I think I know
> the answer, but I'll ask anyway: can these pots be saved?
>
> Eleanor
> Grumpy for a while, OK now.
>
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