Alex Solla on sat 23 sep 06
I just have to add a minor technology note here to Vince's post.
In the past year (not sure when)... there was a wonderful article in Ceramic Technology about how bricks are made. The BIG wakeup call for me was when they raved about how automated the process was. Basically, from the time the clay powders were fed into the mill, to the time the pallets of bricks were loaded onto a truck NO human hands touched the brick. They were loaded onto kilns by robots. Unloaded the same way. Bound and palletized automatically. Even had some shipping tracking device, might have been RF tagging also implimented. Just amazing. So much for bricks being lo-tech. I guess in order to remain competative industry has had to make refinements into an art/science. No point in IMPORTING brick right? wrong. Happens. Seems silly but apparently if the price is right, anything can be shipped.
cheers,
Alex Solla
Cold Springs Studio Pottery
4088 Cold Springs Road
Trumansburg, NY 14886
607-387-4042 voice/fax
www.coldspringsstudio.com
Vince Pitelka wrote: Okay darling Clayarters, gather around and I'll tell you a story about
bricks. This really is fascinating. Back in the days of the Industrial
Revolution, bricks were fired in large kilns called "clamps." The bricks
were stacked almost solid inside the kiln, with channels through the stack
to conduct the heat from the fireboxes to the flue. The bricks closest to
the channels and especially closest to the firebox would be overfired and
often melted. Those a little farther away would be fired a dark brown. As
the bricks were farther from the heat source the color would lighten through
shades of red-brown and brick-red, to a soft orange-red, until finally there
would be a measure of bricks that weren't fired at all and would be reserved
for the next firing when the clamp was unstacked.
At that time, for common use like factory and utilty buildings, bricks would
be sold as "mill-run" without any sorting, and the common appearance would
be a brick wall with a variety of colors in the brick, depending on how hot
they were fired. For fancy construction - stores, public buildings, and
private homes, the bricks would be graded as they left the factory, so the
customer could purchase bricks of uniform color - that was the "status" look
at the time.
Now, most building bricks (not fire bricks) are extruded from giant
pugmills, and special equipment is available to skim a varying coat of
slurry on the surface of the brick, so that the color changes from
brick-to-brick through the run. These bricks are more expensive - you pay
extra for a load of bricks that has variegated color through the batch - for
what was once "mill-run" - the cheapest available. That's great marketing on
someone's part.
- Vince
Vince Pitelka
Appalachian Center for Craft, Tennessee Technological University
Smithville TN 37166, 615/597-6801 x111
vpitelka@dtccom.net, wpitelka@tntech.edu
http://iweb.tntech.edu/wpitelka/
http://www.tntech.edu/craftcenter/
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clennell on sat 23 sep 06
Sour Cherry Pottery
>
> Vince Pitelka wrote: Okay darling Clayarters, gather
> around and I'll tell you a story about
> bricks. This really is fascinating. Back in the days of the Industrial
> Revolution, bricks were fired in large kilns called "clamps." The bricks
> were stacked almost solid inside the kiln, with channels through the stack
> to conduct the heat from the fireboxes to the flue. The bricks closest to
> the channels and especially closest to the firebox would be overfired and
> often melted. Those a little farther away would be fired a dark brown. As
> the bricks were farther from the heat source the color would lighten through
> shades of red-brown and brick-red, to a soft orange-red, until finally there
> would be a measure of bricks that weren't fired at all and would be reserved
> for the next firing when the clamp was unstacked.
>
> At that time, for common use like factory and utilty buildings, bricks would
> be sold as "mill-run" without any sorting, and the common appearance would
> be a brick wall with a variety of colors in the brick, depending on how hot
> they were fired. For fancy construction - stores, public buildings, and
> private homes, the bricks would be graded as they left the factory, so the
> customer could purchase bricks of uniform color - that was the "status" look
> at the time.
>
> Now, most building bricks (not fire bricks) are extruded from giant
> pugmills, and special equipment is available to skim a varying coat of
> slurry on the surface of the brick, so that the color changes from
> brick-to-brick through the run. These bricks are more expensive - you pay
> extra for a load of bricks that has variegated color through the batch - for
> what was once "mill-run" - the cheapest available. That's great marketing on
> someone's part.
> - Vince
Vince : Thanks for the interesting tale of brick making and brick marketing.
I live in an area with a huge deposit of red clay suitable for brick making.
it is called Queenston shale and runs from Queenston NY to just north of
Toronto to a place called Terra Cotta. There were many brickyards formed
when they dug the Welland Canal between Lake Erie and Lake Ontario- a
passage way to avoid going over Niagara Falls. Since the clay had to be
moved and used for something they made bricks. There is an old guy in town
whose father owned a brickyard here and I love to hear his tales. His dad
would have him crawl in the flue of the big beehive and shot a shotgun up
the chimney while someone lit the fireboxes. This was intended to increase
the draught. What it did for his hearing I can't imagine. He also says they
threw tin cans in the firebox to make a black brick. He now buys and sells
HUGE pugmills that fit on train cars. The pugs are now used for other things
than clay and he ships them around the world. One use for a large pugmill
was to throw dead animals into in order to make food for a mink farm. Beware
of large sausages!
Brampton Brick is not far from here and they make and fire 1 million
bricks/day. This is a student field trip for Sheridan students.
Cheers,
Tony
Patrick Cross on sat 23 sep 06
Just thought I'd throw this in here...sort of on topic. One of my favorite
pack-ratted things is an old hand made brick that has the side of a curved
index finger indented in it from when the maker picked it up. You can
actually see finger print ridges in the clay. I sure would like to get an
idea of just how old it is and maybe even where it may have come from. Who
ever this person was they had huge hands.
Patrick Cross (cone10soda)
On 9/23/06, Alex Solla wrote:
>
> I just have to add a minor technology note here to Vince's post.
> In the past year (not sure when)... there was a wonderful article in
> Ceramic Technology about how bricks are made. The BIG wakeup call for me was
> when they raved about how automated the process was. Basically, from the
> time the clay powders were fed into the mill, to the time the pallets of
> bricks were loaded onto a truck NO human hands touched the brick. They were
> loaded onto kilns by robots. Unloaded the same way. Bound and palletized
> automatically. Even had some shipping tracking device, might have been RF
> tagging also implimented. Just amazing. So much for bricks being lo-tech. I
> guess in order to remain competative industry has had to make refinements
> into an art/science. No point in IMPORTING brick right? wrong. Happens.
> Seems silly but apparently if the price is right, anything can be shipped.
>
> cheers,
> Alex Solla
>
> Cold Springs Studio Pottery
> 4088 Cold Springs Road
> Trumansburg, NY 14886
>
> 607-387-4042 voice/fax
> www.coldspringsstudio.com
>
>
> Vince Pitelka wrote: Okay darling Clayarters, gather
> around and I'll tell you a story about
> bricks. This really is fascinating. Back in the days of the Industrial
> Revolution, bricks were fired in large kilns called "clamps." The bricks
> were stacked almost solid inside the kiln, with channels through the stack
> to conduct the heat from the fireboxes to the flue. The bricks closest to
> the channels and especially closest to the firebox would be overfired and
> often melted. Those a little farther away would be fired a dark
> brown. As
> the bricks were farther from the heat source the color would lighten
> through
> shades of red-brown and brick-red, to a soft orange-red, until finally
> there
> would be a measure of bricks that weren't fired at all and would be
> reserved
> for the next firing when the clamp was unstacked.
>
> At that time, for common use like factory and utilty buildings, bricks
> would
> be sold as "mill-run" without any sorting, and the common appearance would
> be a brick wall with a variety of colors in the brick, depending on how
> hot
> they were fired. For fancy construction - stores, public buildings, and
> private homes, the bricks would be graded as they left the factory, so the
> customer could purchase bricks of uniform color - that was the "status"
> look
> at the time.
>
> Now, most building bricks (not fire bricks) are extruded from giant
> pugmills, and special equipment is available to skim a varying coat of
> slurry on the surface of the brick, so that the color changes from
> brick-to-brick through the run. These bricks are more expensive - you pay
> extra for a load of bricks that has variegated color through the batch -
> for
> what was once "mill-run" - the cheapest available. That's great marketing
> on
> someone's part.
> - Vince
>
> Vince Pitelka
> Appalachian Center for Craft, Tennessee Technological University
> Smithville TN 37166, 615/597-6801 x111
> vpitelka@dtccom.net, wpitelka@tntech.edu
> http://iweb.tntech.edu/wpitelka/
> http://www.tntech.edu/craftcenter/
>
>
> ______________________________________________________________________________
> Send postings to clayart@lsv.ceramics.org
>
> You may look at the archives for the list or change your subscription
> settings from http://www.ceramics.org/clayart/
>
> Moderator of the list is Mel Jacobson who may be reached at
> melpots@pclink.com.
>
>
>
> ---------------------------------
> All-new Yahoo! Mail - Fire up a more powerful email and get things done
> faster.
>
>
> ______________________________________________________________________________
> Send postings to clayart@lsv.ceramics.org
>
> You may look at the archives for the list or change your subscription
> settings from http://www.ceramics.org/clayart/
>
> Moderator of the list is Mel Jacobson who may be reached at
> melpots@pclink.com.
>
Lee Love on sat 23 sep 06
There is a program here called Dash. Guys from the pop band Tokio
spend time in the countryside, learning tradtional skills. One of
the things they learned was building a noborigama, learning to throw
and fire pots. I can't imagine an American rock band doing the
same. But these young men are teaching young Japanese about
traditional skills and that learning them is "cool."
They made their own bricks for their noborigama and fired
them is their charcoal kiln. They had to extend the chimney of the
charcoal kiln to get enough temperature. They salvaged bricks from
an old noborigama and pounded them into grog. They added this to
local clay and made bricks in a simple mold: frame, base and a
packing top board. Some bricks didn't survive the firing, but the
ones that did were easy to to cut into arch shapes.
--
Lee in Mashiko, Japan
http://potters.blogspot.com/
"Let the beauty we love be what we do." - Rumi
Lee Love on sat 23 sep 06
On 9/23/06, Lee Love wrote:
> There is a program here called Dash. Guys from the pop band Tokio
> spend time in the countryside, learning tradtional skills. One of
> the things they learned was building a noborigama, learning to throw
> and fire pots. I can't imagine an American rock band doing the
> same. But these young men are teaching young Japanese about
> traditional skills and that learning them is "cool."
The DASH program homepage:
http://www.ntv.co.jp/dash/
Tokio on the Wiki:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TOKIO
--
Lee in Mashiko, Japan
http://potters.blogspot.com/
"Let the beauty we love be what we do." - Rumi
Rick Hamelin on mon 25 sep 06
Patrick and Vince,
Patrick, if there is a "struck" side on one flat, laying side of your brick where clay was scraped away, leaving lines with a sand faced layer on the opposite side, perhaps your brick is pre-1870 although hand-struck bricks were made regionally even into the 20th century. If it is thinner and smaller than conventional bricks it could be pre-1850 with the thinnest bricks being 18th c.
Vince, colonial and early American masons new the value of hard and soft brick. Hard bricks were recommended to be used above the roof line and soft bricks in the interior of the building.
Rick
--
"Many a wiser men than I hath
gone to pot." 1649
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