neilestrick

Exactly! It's about due for a cleaning...

They're fun to make, but my arms are killing me! 95% of what I make is under 5 pounds so this is rare. When I do these I center the 12 pound pieces in two parts- center half, add the other half, center all that. It's easier that way, and almost as fast. Saves my wrists a lot of strain. I could just muscle it all when I was younger, but now I try to work smarter when I can.

Nah, I just don't clean my splash pan very often. That mess is from a lot of pots. I work with cylinders rather than sausages/coils. For these I throw a 7# base slab with a 1" tall wall, then stack two 12.5# cylinders (all while wet) and pull and shape. After it stiffens up a little bit, I add another 12.5# cylinder to finish it off. So 45 pounds total.

Making a couple of big planters for our deck.

Stroke N Coat would be an expensive way to cover a pot. And they would be opaque if thick enough to cover well.

At first I was concerned they won't keep the TC's from shedding into the kiln, but so far they seem to be doing the job just fine. The downside of the open end is that TC longevity will probably be reduced. We'll see. I'm only about a dozen firings in on mine, so too early to tell.

Why? They work great. I've never had accuracy problems with them. I have several customers who have added them to their Skutt kilns to keep the TCs from shedding all over.

Controllers die. When a controller starts having problems it's best to just replace it, especially when it's that old. Often one programming system will die, either the Ramp/Hold or the Cone Fire. Or buttons stop working, etc. One thing to check before you give up on it- is it in a very humid environment? Humidity can cause the circuit board to malfunction. If so, try drying the back of the board with a hair dryer and see if it starts working. Don't overheat it, be gentle. I

L&L has switched to an open-ended protection tube. There were issues with the closed-end tubes being inconsistent in thickness. The open-ended tubes do not need an offset. Default setting in the controller is 0 offset. @Pres Make sure your thermocouples are all the same distance from the end of the proctection tubes, about 3/8 in from the end.

Unfortunately, not always. In my new kiln I'm finding that it's closer to accurate at cone 04 than at cone 6, which is not entirely surprising since accuracy often declines at higher temps. But it's not a huge difference so I'll probably do a TC offset based on the cone 6 numbers and let the bisque be off a bit since it won't affect much. The basic rule is that if they're off by about the same at both temps then you do a TC offset. If it's not acceptably close then you do a cone offset. That's why they give you both options. Most people only fire at two cones- one for bisque and one for glaze- so it's not difficult to figure it out. But if you do a cone offset and decide to fire at cone 5 instead of 6, I would expect the offsets to be very similar since they are so close in temp.

If they're in the brick far enough to hold solid they will work. I don't have confidence in the two coming from the top, though. If you want to make a guard rail, I would try straightening out the staples so they're nice and long, and put a series of straight pins all along there, as that will give you more metal into the bricks.

In my experience, very few people are affected by the molds in clay. I've spent 8 years in University studios, 3 years in a clay supplier business, and 17 years teaching classes in my own studio, and I've only run into two people that had to drop classes due to mold sensitivity. I've got students with immune deficiency conditions (I don't know the specific conditions) and it doesn't affect them. Mold is unavoidable in the clay itself, short of mixing your own clay every time you go to work with it, which would be very poor clay to work with. And doesn't seem to be the type of mold that causes strong reactions and health issues like you'd get in moldy drywall. If it was we'd all be experiencing health issues every time we opened a bag. I think that testing a bag of clay for specific molds would be useless because the clay body materials are sourced form different places and you would/could get different spores from every batch of raw materials. The studio itself is a different story. There's no reason it should be any more moldy than any other environment due to the clay itself. If your local studio is musty, I'd first determine if the issue is the clay, or something else like a damp basement, etc. Just using clay in a space shouldn't contribute to the mustiness if the space is dry in the first place, because the mold needs moisture to proliferate. If the smell is from slop buckets or standing water in the sink, those issue can be easily dealt with. However I've got open slop buckets in my studio, and we do not have any oder or mustiness problems from them. If we did, then lids would solve the problem there. Personally, I'm allergic to molds in the environment, and my allergies are always a mess in the Spring when it's rainy and in the Fall from leaf molds. The studio environment never sets them off, though.

If you fire it with that element unsupported, it'll sag and stretch and you'll have a mess. Because of the element holder you can't pin it as-is. You have several choices on how to deal with it: 1. You can carefully chip out the rest of that holder and then pin. Install a pin every 4-5 coils, pins angled upward so they don't sag. Place the pins at the upper part of the coil so the element hangs on the pins. When it's time to replace elements, replace the holder then by method 3 below. 2. Carefully chip out the broken holder and install a new new one by chewing off the bottom lip of the new holder with a pair of pliers and pocketing it in. If you break the upper groove in the brick this won't work, so be careful. Kiln cement tends to keep it from sitting flush in the brick, so don't use any other than along the front edge at the bottom, just along the surface of the joint, if needed. 3. If the elements are flexible enough, you can carefully pull the element out of the groove, remove the brick, slide in a new holder, and slide the brick back in. HERE is a video, although it's much more extensive than what you need to do. You just need to loosen the body band clamps and slide the brick out. Also remove any parts on the outside of the kiln between the clamps and the broken brick because the screws will keep the band from being able to move. I'd go ahead and replace both holders in the brick. Your elements look pretty good. Check them with a meter, but I think they'll work for a while still.

@Morgan Okay, when firing to cone 6, the controller's default is 2232F. You put in a negative number for the cone offset to lower the target temp. If you put in -10, then it fires 10 degrees lower to 2222F for cone 6. With a thermocouple offset, when you lower the thermocouple temp, the controller must then go that much hotter in order to get to the target temp. Again for cone 6, imagine the kiln is holding temp at 2232F. If you then do a thermocouple offset of -10F, the thermocouple is going to read 2222F, and the controller is going to heat up that section of the kiln 10 degrees to get it back to reading 2232F. So the negative offset makes the kiln go hotter. Conversely, if you set a positive TC offset of 10 degrees, the TC is going to read 2242F, and the kiln is going to have to cool that section 10 degrees in order to meet the target temp of 2232F.

Do you mean in terms of the controller? The controller doesn't care about the elements, it just has to switch the relays.

I've got a couple of pyrometers here. If I have time tomorrow I'll try splitting a TC wire in a terminal block close to them and see what happens. In theory it should work better than running two wires from the same TC where ones goes to a controller mounted on the kiln and another that's far away, as there would be a temperature difference and wire length difference in that setup. Not holding my breath for it to be good enough to do it for real, though.

Did you have two sets of wires attached at the TC block? Not that I'm convinced it will work, but it would be interesting to see how they behaved in different configurations- two sets of wires vs a split somewhere closer to the controllers. Also interesting to see how they behave with wires of different lengths (one to kiln controller and one to farther away pyrometer) vs same lengths (controllers at same distance from kiln, sitting next to each other.

The Skutt non-touchscreen controller is bigger than the standard Bartlett controller. The touchscreen upgrade has a mounting plate that fits the larger Skutt hole. You could probably put in on your other kilns, but you'd have to drill new holes. Take a look at the installation instructions for the Skutt and make sure there isn't something that would be a problem. The Genesis controller is less expensive than the Skutt upgrade.

The majority of people who get into ceramics now are going to work in cone 6 if they plan to have a home studio. And for a large percentage of commercial studios it can be just as difficult to install a gas kiln because of zoning restrictions and cost, which was the case for my studio. In 2008 I moved my studio after 4 years at its original location, where I had a gas kiln, and it proved impossible to install a gas kiln at another location in my town because of landlords who didn't want it in their buildings and because of the cost. Those costs included making changes to the studio to increase fire ratings of shared walls, as well as the cost of upgrading gas lines and moving and re-installing the ventilation system. I already had the kiln and it was still going to cost me $35K+ to do all the other stuff. So instead I bought two electric kilns for about $6000, and I have never regretted it. From the standpoints of running a community studio and producing my own line of work, firing electric has made my studio life much easier and freed up a lot of my time because I don't have to babysit the kiln. I can be at home with my family, or out on repair jobs, or at an art fair while the kilns are firing. I can have the kilns on while my students are in the studio, because they're so much quieter than most gas kilns. I can fire overnight while I sleep, and my students can load and run the kilns if I get too busy with repair work. Other benefits of electric kilns for me are faster turnaround times and more size options. Because they cool faster, I can get pieces fired and moved through the studio faster than I could with my gas kiln. My little test kiln allows me to fire just a couple of mugs at a time so I can get small orders out the door faster, and I do a lot more glaze testing than I did with my gas kiln. It has been mentioned that people feel more connected to the firing when they fire with gas, but I have found the opposite to be true. With electric kilns I'm more connected to what's happening during a firing because I program exactly what's happening, with a precision that wasn't there with gas. I have far more control over what's happening every minute, and I put much more thought into my firing schedules than I ever did when I fired with gas. I also have to be more aware of how I load the electric kilns than I did with gas, as I don't have the benefit of moving air and pressure in an electric kiln. Even though I'm not turning up dials and adjusting dampers and doing the physical work during a firing, mentally I'm much more in tune with the firing than before. After 29 years of making pots and working in all temperatures, I'm mostly just tired of the attitudes that one type of firing/cone is better than another. That attitude was instilled in me during my college years, and it cost me a lot of time and money and creative progress when I got out of school because I was so hung up on the idea that I needed to make cone 10 reduction pots in order to make good pots. The reality was that my situation was really better suited for cone 6 electric work, and instead of jumping into that I spent a lot of time more focused on trying to get a gas kiln set up when I didn't really need one. For most people, one certain type of kiln/firing is going to be the best option for their studio. That may be electric because of zoning rules, or it may be gas because of their production needs. Most people won't have much of a choice, but no one should ever be made to feel like they're making a sacrifice because of it. Everyone should feel confident that they can make great work no matter how they fire.

I sent an email to the owner of L&L this morning explaining the issue, and he responded: Thanks. I will take a look at that and make any corrections necessary. I've been a distributor for L&L for 17 years, and have seen them make many changes to their manuals over that time. Sometimes they just put a flyer in the front pocket of the binder until they can make more permanent changes to the manual.

Definitely a possibility. Might just need to start over with mounting the hinge. Pull the tension rod, loosen up the hinge, make sure the body bands are all tight and even, and start over. Have the springs sitting on the rod as mirror images. Does the lid sit flush all the way around when the hinge isn't assembled? Push the hinge up and make sure the spring rod is sitting in the bottom of the oval holes on both sides. Tighten everything up. Lid should still be flush and even at this point. Open it up all the way, insert the tension rod and close it. It should go back down and still sit evenly on the kiln. it may be off by a tiny bit side to side, but not so much that you can't just scootch it over a bit to get it to latch.

They usually sit better with the lighter tension, use whichever works best. In that picture it looks like it's sitting pretty evenly side to side. Where is the gap? At the front?

@Pres You definitely didn't do any harm with your first firing. I'll talk to L&L about making it more clear what should be done with the first firing. I think the confusion comes with the Genesis controller being added in as a separate booklet.

They are awesome kilns, incredibly well built and durable and long lasting. I talked with many customers who had 40 year old kilns that were still in use. Alpine got a bad rap because updrafts are a little bit more difficult to fire, and they were a little late getting into the downdraft game. There was also a famous old-school potter and kiln guy who bad-mouthed them constantly on the ClayArt forum. Each Alpine updraft has its own personality, and once you get to know how it likes to fire it's very consistent and dependable. I have a friend with two Alpine updrafts at his school that that were delivered on the same day, sequential serial numbers, same models, sit right next to each other, and one fires an hour faster than the other.

@ECpot there are two holes for the bottom hinge rod. One for higher tension one for lower tension. Try the other hole. Also make sure your springs are the same- both with ends in the center on the top the other ends on the outside. Don't do one outside and one inside at the same position.