Playing with Fire
Playing
with Fire is a course run over two weekends in the Spring by my partner
in fire Lexa Laurance
at her Kiln site at Farleigh Hungerford in the County of Wiltshire in
England's beautiful West Country.
The object
of the exercise is to show that serious Kilns capable of large amounts
of heatwork can be built
and fired using scrap, recycled, or renewable materials.
Some of the Kilns we have built and fired over the last few years:
From the early days, three pictures of the Hasseris Kiln being built, fired and opened:
To the left the Trench, very dramatic at the finish. In the left
background ;
one of Lexa's earliest Tree Kilns.
In 1998 Lexa and the team built The Camel!
From 1999 The Pig at its most dramatic!
In addition to the Kilns we have built using wattle and daub, we have also used commonly available house bricks.
This Kiln we called the 60 minute Kiln as that is how long it took a group of us to build it! However the firebox was too small and quickly became clogged; So we rebuilt the whole thing doubling the size of the firebox and using a locally made buff brick which we discovered (accidentally) can handle high temperatures.
That did the trick, and although the Kiln walls are only 4.5 inches thick we are able to achieve cone 10 plus pretty easily during the summer months(!) For fuel we are using bundles of off-cuts from a local sawmill. These are a mix of soft and semi-hardwoods and need drying and seasoning before use. We are also using small amounts of salt in the French style i.e. in small containers placed in the Kiln alongside the pots, rather than thrown in in large quantities at the end of the firing.
For 2001 we rebuilt this Kiln, making it wider rather than
deeper to accommodate more pots. It worked quite well
except that the foundations were not strong enough, so it effectively
broke its back and we had to take it down.
If you are interested in building a Kiln similar to one of these
the following information might be useful.
The bricks used are standard British house brick size 9 X 4.5 X 3
Inches, (22.9 X 11.4 X 7.6 Centimetres).
From these measurements you should be able to work out the proportions
by counting the bricks used.
No mortar or cement was used, this allows the kiln to expand and
contract without breaking too many bricks,
and also means that replacement is relatively easy! The whole is held
together with pieces of angle iron on the
corners, fencing wire, and fencing turnbuckles. As we found in 2001 a
good foundation is absolutely essential!
In
the spring of 01 we built one of these Kilns in a friend’s
garden, shortening the length by three brick lengths, and increasing
the depth of the firebox by two courses. It fires beautifully, and when
the pot chamber was increased in size to accommodate larger pots there
were no adverse effects The following pictures will be of some help in
your experiments.
This side view of my friends garden Kiln should give you an idea of the
proportions.
You can also see the two vents at the bottom of the firebox which serve
to keep the
embers burning properly. There are two or three on each side.
In these drawings I illustrate my reasons for
putting only two firebars in the firebox:
tilting the fuel at an angle makes for a much broader flame,
consequently better conbustion
all round, and a reduction in cold air.
If you are interested in taking part in the next Playing With Fire, please