First Kiln Firing Begins

This morning, I made it over to Aadvark in Santa Ana and picked up some cones, a greenware bowl, some blue glaze, and some clear glaze. Mis-read the kiln instruction which said to get 01 cones. I got 1 cones. Still getting used to this.

The cone range is from 022 to 14. It goes 022, 021, 020,...,03, 02, 01, 1,2,3,..., 13,14,15. Kinda wierd. More wierd than wire sizes even. Fortunately the temp difference between a 01 and a 1 is only 30 degrees. So I'm going with it.

I applied the kiln wash to the bottom and the shelves. Mixing this up was easy. It's a fine powder. Make sure you use your N95 dust mask! Just put some in an old butter tub, added water, and mixed with a cheapo throw away brush. I used about a 1/3rd of the bag Paragon sent with the kiln. They said mix it to a consistency of thick cream. I'd say uncut latex paint was closer. Maybe bar-b-q sauce or ketchup. The shelves were thirsty. The kiln bottom was less thirsty than I thought it would be. On the shelves is seemed to be better to get a good glop on there and spread it pretty quickly across the shelf. I was using a 1 inch brush. A 2 inch would have been better actually.

So, it's about 1:00 p.m., it's been on for an hour and is approaching 400 degrees.

It comes on and goes off in about 10 second increments. So it's probably actually a 50% duty cycle. That's very good for the wiring. I now feel a heck of a lot better about the safety margin of the electrical specifications.

More later.

John