neilestrick

It's easier to overpower these little round kilns. Sometimes you need to back off the burners to get them to go. Also, what size shelves did you have in the kiln? You usually need to use a smaller shelf than what an electric kiln of that size would use, so there's room for air to flow. A lot of people also put a shelf at the top, like 3 inches below the flue opening. Even a short pipe over the flue will increase the draw. You can even make a small chimney out of stacked soft brick.

Murphy's will work okay on the wood. The smoother the wood is the better, though, so the plaster doesn't have anything to grip on. Tapping a bunch works fine. If you were making lots of mold then a vibrating system would be good, but for the occasional one-off you'll be fine. https://ceramicartsnetwork.org/daily/article/Plaster-Mixing-101-How-to-Mix-Plaster-for-Ceramic-Molds

Interesting stuff. The main thing it's missing is that the sodium is not just reacting with the silica. It also needs alumina in order for it to form the glaze. Pure silica will not be affected by sodium vapor. We used to dust flint onto our salt kiln shelves to protect them. High zirconia blanket is about 15-17% zircon. It's in there primarily to bump up the heat rating of the blanket. It may help protect from the soda, but not much. High zirconia bricks are 60+% zircon, so it's going to be considerably more durable than the fiber. The life span of salt and soda kilns depends more on the amount of salt and soda being used in each firing than which one you're using. Salt kilns can outlast soda kilns and vice versa. In general, I see soda people using a lot more material than salt people. Neither salt nor soda is more dangerous than the other, and your car will create many times more pollution than a salt/soda kiln being fired every week. Much of what comes out the stack is water vapor, and about 96% of the salt/soda that goes into the kiln comes out the stack as the same thing. Read 'The Truth About Salt' by Gil Stengel in the Sept. 1998 Ceramics Monthly. HERE is some other good info. HERE is a good discussion.

Looks like it's wired wrong. You've got a wire going from the relay to the element, then jumping to the other end of the element. Each element needs both wires from the relay. So the relay wires should go to one element, then jump to the other element:

Does the kiln have a safety switch on the lid? If so, it may be out of adjustment.

I agree regarding the firing schedule. A shorter firing with holds in the proper places could cuts hours off the firing time, and probably reduce firing costs as well. The slow creep to 300F is totally unnecessary, especially if your work is dry. Just run it up to 200F or 220F, hold as long as needed to make sure everything is dry, then go for it. Also, that first ramp can be a lot faster than 60F/hr, like 150F/hr will work just fine. There's no reason to take 2 hours to get to the preheat temp, because the hold is where you're really drying things out.

If the body bands are tight (check them) then the plywood is unnecessary, and you can definitely tilt the sections to get them through doorways. Just don't grab along the inside lip of the bricks you you could crack the grooves. Use the carrying handles and you'll be fine.

A cleanup with a commutator stone will probably help a lot. Does the motor have a small access plate on the side?

Fibrecoat sounds very similar to other zircon based coatings. The problem is that fiber shrinks, cracks, etc, and those small cracks will allow for penetration by the soda fumes. You just can't create a complete barrier with the coating. it may last a while if you're religious about re-coating it, but there's a reason everyone uses hard bricks for salt/soda kilns. It's been proven to be the best option.

Move it in sections, don't try to lift it all at once. Unhook and remove the lid. Stack the sections in the truck, making two stacks if you can. Put foam board underneath each section. The pink house insulation board works well. Set down the wall sections first, with the lid and floor slabs on top (if the floor is a separate piece). Foam board separating everything. Wrap it all up with plastic stretch wrap and secure the load as best you can. I use a cargo tarp and that works really well. If you put straps over the top, put foam board between the straps and the kiln. Don't crank down too tight with straps or you could crack the bricks.

Those coatings may be beneficial in a typical reduction firing because they harden the surface of the fiber and make it more durable, but in something as corrosive as soda or salt it won't be able to protect it enough. The atmosphere is just too corrosive.

That's a cone 05, not 5. That would explain why the cone 5 glazes didn't melt.

What color is the cone?

I usually fire my kilns at night so I don't really see what's happening with actual temps in the kiln, but today I started it up in the morning and was in the studio in the evening and got to see exactly what was happening during the cooling cycle. I do a slightly-slow cooling cycle to even out the results in my 3 kilns because they all cool at drastically different rates due to their sizes. I do a drop from the peak down to 2000F, then cool at 175F/hr down to 1500F. This gives me identical results from all 3 of my kilns. This firing I'm talking about here is in my 10 cubic foot L&L EQ2827-3, which has 3 zones, and was packed very tight in the middle. I was surprised at just how much slower the middle cools compared to the top and bottom. This photo shows how it's going part way through the initial drop from peak temp to 2000F: As you can see, the middle and the top are nowhere close to each other. In a normal firing segment, a 73 degree difference would stop the firing with an error code. So why isn't it doing that here? It's because the cooling rate is set at 9999, or full speed. Any time you use 9999, whether it's climbing or dropping, the controller lets the kiln do its thing and doesn't care if the sections aren't even. Firing up or down at 9999 is the fastest, but you sacrifice evenness. As the temp continues to drop, we see this: Here you can see that the top section (TC1) has started firing again. The set point for this segment was 2000F, at which point it should start cooling at 175F/hr, yet the top section passed that by about 20 degrees before the relay kicked on and the controller stopped the drop. Why did it let it get so far below the set point? Because it's averaging the 3 zones. Once the average of the 3 zones hits the set point it will start to fire each section again as needed to match the set point. I get a lot of questions from customers about error codes and cooling cycles. The biggest problem is that the kiln can't always keep up with the programmed cooling rate. There are a number of firing schedules out there on the internet that people are trying that use a rate of 600F/hr or more for the fast drop portion of the cooling cycle, and many kilns simply cannot cool that fast, especially the middle section. When you have a specific rate programmed, the controller will send out an error code if the kiln can't keep up with that rate. So if you want a really fast drop you should use 9999F/hr, not a specific rate. For most people doing slow cooling with cone 6 work it won't matter if the sections are not totally even during the drop. If you do need more precision, like if you're firing crystalline work and it's important that you don't overshoot any target temps, then you'll want to put in a slower drop rate that the kiln can actually keep up with, and the controller will keep the sections even and not overshoot set points.

They would probably be okay, but any time you shut down a glaze before it's gone through its complete melting cycle there's a chance of something going wrong like crawling. It would also depend totally on the glaze formula as to just how much things would harden up at low temps. I would just carefully wrap them in something soft and pack them so they don't move and rub. If you're using brushing glazes they tend to be pretty durable before firing anyway.

Does the kiln come apart in sections or is it all one piece? Is the floor joined to the bottom of the kiln?

Hi @BarbaraT, welcome to the forum. Please post a picture of the damaged area, and a wider shot that shows how the kiln is constructed.

The wedge has to split the air, so the alignment of the mouthpiece and the tip of the wedge is critical. Adjusting the wedge up or down usually solves the problem. The width of your mouthpiece slot may be a problem, since the slot appears to be wider than the wedge hole. Could be a lot of the air is just going into the cavity without ever touching the wedge. I used to do a lot of whistles with my kids classes, and we just used a sharpened popsicle stick to make both the mouthpiece slot and the wedge hole, so everything was the same width. Beyond getting it to whistle, I cannot offer any help with actually tuning an ocarina. I've only ever made whistles.

All dark brown/black bodies do odd things with glazes. You have to do a lot of testing to find glazes that work well with them. Those that do can be really striking, though, especially if you leave areas of the clay body visible. My students use a fair amount of Standard 266, and it's a wonderful body to work with. Has a great feel. Don't go past cone 5 with it, though, or you risk bloating.

Raku glazes are often high in metals, but that doesn't necessarily mean they'll fume any worse than a regular glaze. I assume the kiln is vented?

@alaphair The 500C wire will work, assuming the listing is legit and that's what you'll actually get. It's one of those random Chinese brands which sometimes have iffy quality. It's a plenty high temp rating, though. SRML wire is pretty standard stuff for most kilns, so look at that, too. You'll need 12 gauge wire. Regular house wire is not appropriate for this application, it must be high temp wire. Is the existing short wire already connected to the element with the crimp barrel connector? The barrel connector at the element has to be a high temp connector. The slip on terminal at the other end of the wire can be a standard connector.

Interesting design, elements set into the fiber. I've seen that on very small kilns, like the little Paragon table top jewelry kilns, but never in something this large. Due to its construction and the fact that these are no longer made, when the elements are dead the kiln will have to be tossed. There's no replacing those elements. It would be good to figure out if all the elements are working before you put any money into wiring it up. Do you have a multi meter? If not, you can get one at the hardware store for like $20, and with that you can measure the resistance of the elements. Just make sure it's digital and can measure ohms (the little horseshoe symbol). With that number we can math out if the elements are worn or if any of them are broken. At 9600 watts it will pull 40 amps, so by code it would need a 50 amp breaker using at least 6 gauge wire for the circuit.

I fire to cone 6 in my studio, and I have not seen Palladium look like any of those 3 tiles. When thin it goes green, not lighter metallic. When thick enough to go metallic it runs off the pot. I'm not willing to change firing schedules to satisfy one glaze, so my students won't touch it any more because it has been nearly impossible for them to use successfully.

I think it's probably an application issue. How long are you waiting between applying the two glazes? My guess is that the inside is still too wet when you apply the second glaze, and it's failing to get good adhesion, which is causing the crawling. I imagine the ash glaze takes forever to dry?

ConeArt, L&L, and some other kilns all have multiple zones, where each section of the kiln is firing independently of the other. They typically fire a little slower than single zone kilns because they are working to keep the sections even in temperature. As long as the results are okay, it doesn't matter. And only the final ramp rate, the last 100C degrees or so, is really what affects how your glazes turn out. That is typically the slowest ramp rate in the firing, so it is most likely on schedule at that point.