Fire good, bring trees!

[earcmacfithil]

I'm stoking up the wood-fire kiln! I lit yesterday, stoked for several hours, then let it die down overnight. After breakfast, I'll re-light and stoke all day! It looks like I'll be going into tomorrow. If you'd like to come see, let me know. Otherwise, I'll post some updates here as comments.

Comments

[earcmacfithil]

I've paused for lunch, letting several cherry logs burn down to embers. After lunch, I'll break out the bathroom-fan-blower and blow all the accumulated ash from the fire-box all over the inside of the kiln. Then I'll resume stoking.

[earcmacfithil]

Today's my power-stoking day in the wood-fire kiln. I expect to achieve yellow-heat. I want to hold that longer than I did in the last firing because the longer I hold the kiln at high temps, the drippier my ash becomes.

I'm also running a cone-10 reduction firing in the gas kiln...or I will be as soon as I get things glazed, which I'll start doing in an hour or so when my drill-powered mixer is less likely to annoy the little boy next door.

[earcmacfithil]

We unloaded the kiln today. Results were mixed. The kiln was under-fired overall. I knew that already, since cone 9 was down and 10 half-down when I shut down the kiln. It was 22.30 and I had to get up at 05.00, so even though the firing wasn't done, I had to go to bed anyway (darned day-job). I'll have to make a note of that and do something differently in the October firing.

There was a lot of good color development, though. Some of the glazes on the insides of some of the pieces was barely done. Most of what was on the bottom near the fire-box had a lot of good ash. Curiously, a couple of the mid-range shards I put in there as part of my Salvadore Dali experiment didn't deform...maybe if I'd reached cone 12?