neilestrick

My biggest concern is the health of my family. None of us is in a high risk category, but that's no guarantee. I also really worry about how one person in our house getting sick could theoretically snowball into someone dealing with 8 weeks of isolation if it takes 2 weeks for each person to show symptoms. It would not be fun for me, but my business expenses are pretty low and I don't have any employees to worry about. I could get through being closed for 2 months if I had to. For my wife's veterinary clinic it would be a different story. She's got two full time employees, and much higher costs to cover. Plus her clinic is only 8 months old, so she's still building clientele. Losing 8 weeks of business would be expensive and slow down growth. So at this point we're being as as safe as we can. We're stocked up on food, and the kids are home, my studio is empty, my wife is taking extra precautions to minimize contact at the clinic, and we've got our fingers crossed. So far there are only a couple of cases in our county, but there's also a sever lack of testing being done nationwide, so I'm sure the numbers are a lot worse than what's being reported.

Yesterday I took a look at an L&L built in 1973. It needs elements and a wiring upgrade (still has the old waxed cloth wires), but it'll be good to go after that. The customer also had another L&L from 1964 that was still functional. Age means nothing, condition means everything.

It's not that impressive. I just have a few online sources I get most things from. There's really only about half a dozen things that the vast majority of my kiln repairs need.

When it comes to kiln elements I always go with OEM. Each company makes their elements a little differently, and having their specific elements in the kiln can help with diagnosing problems because they know how it should be working. I use OEM bricks, of course, because they won't line up well otherwise. Beyond that, everything else on a kiln is off the shelf stuff. All the switches, relays, wiring, etc can be purchased elsewhere. Some things I can get cheaper from the kiln manufacturer, some things I can't .

Ceramic Supply Chicago is 35 minutes away. US Pigment is about an hour away. In the Chicago area anything within in hour is considered close, and nothing is lees than 20 minutes away! A.R.T Clay and Great Lakes Clay were also within an hour, but they have both closed in the last couple of years. Yep, I had 4 suppliers within an hour of my studio! I guess that's why a couple of them are now gone. When I lived in Iowa I had to drive up to Minneapolis to stock up, which wasn't necessarily a bad thing because we'd make a day of it and enjoy being in the big city.

Are you using a digital or manual kiln? A manual kiln will be difficult to slow down at the high end of a firing to achieve better burnout. Have you put cones in the kiln to verify that you're getting a true cone 5?

Handiness is a secondary benefit to having gone through college ceramics programs. We never had much of a budget, so if we needed something like table or shelving, we built our own. When things needed fixing, we did it ourselves. In grad school we even ran our own plumbing for the gas kilns to save money. It drove the facilities guys nuts, but we always passed inspection.

I rarely ever pay someone to fix things, especially in the studio. At home I will hire someone only if it's an extreme situation that's beyond my ability as an accomplished DIY'er, like if I need a new roof. I enjoy fixing things, though, so it's not a problem. You either need to be handy or need to be able to write a check.

I allow food and drink in my studio, except during glazing week. The rest of the time they are only touching clay, no glaze materials, so there's not any real risk of ingesting something dangerous. We have a pretty steady supply of baked goods and candy coming through the studio.

If all the elements glow when the kiln is on high, but it won't get to temp, then you need new elements. Turn it on high and carefully crack the lid and peek in to see if they're all working. If they are, you can call Paragon and see if they still have any elements in stock. Also call Euclids.com and they should be able to help you.

If you've got those bats that are made for the Aspire that have the grid on the backside, I wouldn't be surprised if they wobble. It's common for that type of bat. The Speedball bats do it too. It may or may not be an issue once you get some clay on the wheel. Have you tried throwing on them?

Damper at the exit flue. Assuming the flue opening is the correct size, the full draft of the chimney is too much and you need to be able to damper it down. Otherwise too much heat goes out the stack, and you can't control the pressure in the kiln or secondary air draw.

At 1 cubic meter you've got about 32 cubic feet of interior space, so you need a minimum of 500,000 btu/hr, probably more, to get to cone 10. I'm betting your little propane tanks are freezing up more than you think, especially if you're running more than one burner off a tank. You need a damper to control the secondary air draft and internal kiln pressure. Your burner ports look to be pretty big for a burner of that size. The lack of safety equipment on the burners is troublesome. They're not even mounted to something that will keep them in place. And it looks like the heat from the chimney is going straight onto the building above?

Is the top of the kiln just those shelves?

Test tiles. My shop is closed for the next 2 weeks, so I'm going to focus on getting some things done that I haven't had time to do, like running glaze tests. I make my tiles by throwing a 3 pound ring at the edge of a 13 inch bat, then decorating it with underglazes and cutting it up into about 25 tiles.

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I think the displacement of the liquid by the steeper. The clay steeper will have a lot more volume than a thin metal one, so it will displace more water when you put it in the mug, possibly overflowing the mug. Might be best to put the steeper in first, then pour the water in. Or throw them super thin?

I constantly stress to my students that they need to know what they're going to make before they get the clay out of the bag. That way they'll know how much clay to prep, and have a clear path to successfully making a certain pot. There are specific steps that must be taken to make any form, and if you're not following those steps and just letting the clay do what it wants, you'll always end up with a crappy bowl.

Try Potterycrafts UK. It looks like they bought up Podmore a long time ago.

The bleeding is from the glaze!

I follow a number of people on Instagram who use bleeding underglaze, and I've never seen them making it bleed in the raw stage. It's always the glaze causing the bleed. I can control the degree of bleeding on my work by simply making the glaze more or less fluid.

I don't think adding flux to the underglaze is going to help much, unless you add enough that it actually melts like a glaze. Focus on the clear glaze. Needs to be fluid, and needs to be thick enough to move. I don't get any bleeding if the glaze is too thin.

You need the clear glaze to move, and you have to put the underglaze thick enough that it'll get picked up. It shouldn't matter when you apply them. I do all my underglaze decorating on leather hard, and the glaze still moves it even though the underglaze gets bisque fired on.

The Skutt 181 usually has the old, old, old style kiln sitter, which does not have the large black cover plate. The box is much narrower than models with the modern Sitter. There may not be room to fit a controller, and the relays and controls will be subject to a lot of heat.

The Skutt 181 needs a 30 amp breaker. A 50 amp breaker would not be within code, which says the breaker should be 25% greater than the draw of the kiln, but not more than 50% greater. If I remember correctly the 181 only pulls 22-24 amps, so at 150% a 40 amp breaker would be the largest. The KM818 pulls 27.8 amps, so at 25% greater you'd need a 40 amp breaker. At 50% greater, that gets you to 42 amps, which technically allows for the use of a 50 amp breaker, but I'd stick with the 40 for that, too.