Light my fire

[offcntr]

In the spirit of "before and after," here's a couple of short video clips. First right after I lit the burners, at the start of the firing; the second, as I wait for the last cones to go down. Cone 8 is completely down, cone 9 nearly. Still need the third cone, 10, to drop. (The last cone is a guard cone, to let me know if I've gone too far. At cone 11, the pictures start sliding off the sides of my pots.)



No song this time, just the music of the fire itself.

Comments

[pepperly]

Woah, is that a DIY kiln? I've only seen the tiny-in-comparison pot-like ones back in high school. I don't think I've ever seen one this size before.

[offcntr]

Yeah, we built that one ourselves--well, I say we, but it was in place when I joined Club Mud in 1998. I was involved with a complete rebuild in 2003, after somebody blew it up. (Not quite as scary as it sounds. One of the burner valves was slightly open, and rather than shutting it down and waiting for the gas to clear, he hurried to try and get it lit before the gas built up. He did not succeed--raised the roof about six inches and shot the peephole plugs across the room. But he wasn't hurt, and most of his pots were intact when we excavated the wreckage.) We tore it down to the burner ports and rebuilt it completely, except for the chimney.

This is our big car kiln--the floor and door roll out on tracks to load and unload. Stacking footprint is three by four feet (six 12x24" kiln shelves.)

It holds a lot of pots.