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Building A Top Loader Kiln Lid.


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If anybody was wondering how this project went, well, I would say not the best! After a few firings a crack started to appear across the middle. Then the guy who I used to share the studio with (now left after many problems) decided to put another loose layer of bricks on top while I was away and helped the crack go all the way through the brick.

 

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What was my mistake?

I assumed the kiln cement would arrive at the right consistency to get on with.

 

I tried my best to research but I never read anywhere about watering down the cement until I bought Olsen's kiln book. I should have bought it before starting this project... Looking back at the Pargon kiln video their cement was a lot more fluid and I should have noticed :(

 

Lots of the joins ended up being 5mm instead of the recommended 1mm. Mixing up the cement into a thinner consistency would, I think, have given me much better results.

 

In the end I am selling this piece of ... and buying myself a shiny new kiln so I can stress out about more important things. Still it has taught me a lot battling with it to make it work properly.

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I hate to say it, but if the mortar joints are good then the cracks usually appear in the bricks more than the joints. Also, if you ever do this again, do not use a simple running bond like you did, because you have long joints running all the way across the lid which aren't strong. Next time do more of a circular pattern, so you have short joints that are spanned by whole bricks, if that makes sense.

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Something like the picture in the first post? I was going to go with that idea but couldn't work out the logistics of sticking them together.

 

Lots of mistakes made but lots learnt. I knew it was going to fail when I measured the mortar and it was 5x too big!

 

I won't be doing it again any time soon  :huh:  I now have 80 K26 IFB to do something with... No ideas come to mind yet. 

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