oldlady

photos would be a big help. potterycrafts is from the UK and many of our best tech types are in the US. brickwork should be the same everywhere so photos are the best. show the metal jacket on your kiln and the way it is fastened tightly around the bricks. do you have several sections or just one metal jacket for the entire kiln?

hope it is still there on mother's day. i have a winter's worth of work to glaze and sell on that day.

some days are harder than others. i am sure neil is looking at this with pain in his eyes. and bill is shaking his head.

or coffee.

i do not throw much anymore, have found slab pots more fun to make and easier to sell. but i love to trim bowls. i do it with a strange tool that you would not thing of as a trimming tool. it is the huge open circle on one end of a wooden handle that has a smaller circle at the other end. they are no longer sold or made by kemper. since i form the bowl as a standard planter shape and insert a disc vertically to make the pot spherical, a lot of excess clay winds up being pushed down past the circumference of the bowl. i find that inserting the circle tool at the very bottom of the excess and inserting it absolutely flat and tilting it up as the wheel goes around fast will remove a huge amount of clay in one step. the pot then dries on the duron bat until it lifts off and i do a foot ring to finish it. i think final trimming is fun and i try to do a very fine line spiral from the center out.

the studio windows here in florida really show only a slice of the back yard. but the computer is on the porch facing the street and is all windows to the south. yesterday, a coyote walked swiftly down the street keeping to the grass just off the pavement. i was so shocked by it, i could not have gotten a photo even if the camera had been in my hand. i live in the middle of a city here though there are horses in the next block and more horse properties for at least a mile. the view out the studio door is of most of the back yard. feral cats sneak by at the far end and birds share the huge tree outside the door. blue jays, mostly arguing among themselves, scream by often. a mockingbird frequently touches down to find the caterpillars who have lowered themselves down to the ground searching for a good place to form a cocoon. some just outside on the studio walls.

i am sorry if this has gotten nasty. i certainly did not mean to start a war. i do not WANT to crop a photo, just get it small enough to post here. i apologize.

hulk, you and pye are both assuming that i have the vocabulary to understand what you take for granted. MS means what? pye, radio button? huh? got to be in the studio today. believe it or not i checked out the book computers for dummies and the computers for old people. the writers mean well but they do not start with a glossary and absolutely nobody can define "FILE or FOLDER" ! some jellolike substance that flows all around everywhere is the only thing i can think of.

thanks, i have paint in my bottom toolbar courtesy of my daughter and i know that i can get the right size for here by reducing my photos by 80%. i used to use pixels. easy. today is too busy to do anything more about this but some time in near future i will come back to here.

wish i were one of them! who is coming?

absolutely! the fun of getting into someone's studio or gallery is seeing how things are set up for the kind of work done there. i remember being in a studio in bethesda, md that was as big as a small classroom and held 3 rows of long tables. that potter made huge tile installations and was working on something brand new (at the time). she was portraying DNA which was her husband's field of expertise. the finished work was placed on a wall in a public space near DC. can't remember where but it was an entire wall with garden space in front of it. beautiful! i was fortunate enough to buy a small, square bottle that had peony leaves pressed into the sides. there are 2 places near me in florida that i want to visit. they are new since i was here last, that was may of 2020.

you make a LOT of pots, Tom!

take some muscle power and a large enough vehicle. that is a one piece kiln and not one in sections. be sure to pad its surroundings so braking the car fast will not tip it over. it is good that the owner has separated the shelves with cardboard. be sure to provide a safe place for them and the box of posts, bags of cones and whatever that plastic bag of powder is. if it is kiln wash, throw it away and use the recipe given here on the forum often. your electrician may never have worked with a kiln before. consult neil estrick who answered above about all electric connections. also, take a photo using a camera that is inside the kiln at a level with the grooves holding the elements, the coiled wires that heat up. that is so we can judge whether you need new ones or not. new ones look upright. if they are standing vertically all along the grooves, they have lots of life left. if they are leaning over and touching each other, you might need new elements. if the original user fired it with the various cones shown in the bags, check to see the highest number used. remembering that ZERO 6 is not the same as cone 6. check the charts for the actual numbers. it is possible the kiln never went over cone 06 and the various boxes reflect special glazes or lusters that were at even lower temperatures. good luck with bringing it home and setting it up just where you want it. keep enough distance from surfaces that could be affected by heat and the bricks are NOT BRICKS, you can dent them with a fingernail.

did you get it in time?

i keep my studios pretty clean and i love fresh air. windows are usually open if the temp is warm enough. ac is on in the hot summer if i am working. yes, i use fans, one in the window in the door in florida blows past me and since the space is not large and it is only a 10 inch fan, the air movement is gentle. i avoid making dust and move anything that produces much of it outside where i work away from any openings into the studios. i figure it takes 30 years to get sick from silicosis and at 81, i do not care if i get it at age 111.

lee, i make birds sometimes and there is one just outside my studio door in wv. it is in a planter with a rose bush and i smile every time i see it.

lee, you have the brother to my blue glass bird.

yes, hulk, having a big, convenient wet (i do not mean sopping!) sponge works well for handbuilding, too. those tiny, dry bits of clay will fall off fingers and land in the most awkward place. a small needle tool, not that huge metal thing, makes it easy to pick them up but it is better that they not be there in the first place. two toy buckets are screwed to the front side of my slab roller so i can drop them in and be done with them. slab roller extension makes a great work surface.

having lightning strike the power line did nothing good for my whole electrical menagerie. the wheel suffered a stroke, had to replace the pedal. the ceiling fans, the tv and i don't remember much else all were affected. that lightning strike was about 30 feet from the studio. that was back in the 1990s. since then normal maintenance replacing belts on the wheel and elements in the kilns. my daughter just re-did my L&L last summer, new elements, thermocouples and relays plus stainless screws to hold the control box on the kiln.

neil nailed it, it might work and it might not. i have used pizza stones in my 04 bisque firings but when i tried a cone 6 in my tiny 12x12 test kiln it warped.

i saw a firing using this in england. the 2 men were dressed like astronauts and had lots of experience. be VERY careful if you decide to do this.

oh! thank you, min! this discussion is about CASTING slip. it helps to know the subject, doesn't it?

H yes!

after hearing all this, i am glad i got the bailey 400.

right now, mapquest says i can get to highwater in clearwater, fl in 14 minutes and it's recommended route is 5.2 miles. maps do not show that most of that is through heavy garbage truck traffic to the landfill and all the many trucks servicing the industrial areas. i choose to drive 5.3 miles on normal highways. at home in wv, it is about 65 miles to baltimore or 65 miles to alexandria va. i love going to baltimore and visit lots of places while i am there.