neilestrick

You'll want to use a clay body that fully vitrifies, and I would go with 3/8" thick if they're over 4" wide.  If you're new to making tiles and aren't set up for making and firing them, doing an entire bathroom floor will be a major undertaking. Tile production is a different beast than making pots, and doing it efficiently requires different equipment and a different way of using studio and kiln space. You may want to consider using commercially available tiles for the bulk of the floor, and just make some accent tiles to personalize it.
Also, the process in that article may or may not work for you. Leaving tiles open on a slab of drywall may or may not allow them to dry without warping. It all depends on your clay body and the humidity level in your studio. With a heavily grogged clay they will be more likely to remain flat, but that type of clay may not be appropriate for the type of tiles you're making. If you're doing any carving then you'll want a smooth body, and they will be more likely to warp. The thickness of your tiles will also affect how easily they warp. Try making a batch and see how it goes. You'll have to figure out what works for your situation.

You'll want to use a clay body that fully vitrifies, and I would go with 3/8" thick if they're over 4" wide.  If you're new to making tiles and aren't set up for making and firing them, doing an entire bathroom floor will be a major undertaking. Tile production is a different beast than making pots, and doing it efficiently requires different equipment and a different way of using studio and kiln space. You may want to consider using commercially available tiles for the bulk of the floor, and just make some accent tiles to personalize it.
Also, the process in that article may or may not work for you. Leaving tiles open on a slab of drywall may or may not allow them to dry without warping. It all depends on your clay body and the humidity level in your studio. With a heavily grogged clay they will be more likely to remain flat, but that type of clay may not be appropriate for the type of tiles you're making. If you're doing any carving then you'll want a smooth body, and they will be more likely to warp. The thickness of your tiles will also affect how easily they warp. Try making a batch and see how it goes. You'll have to figure out what works for your situation.

Sounds like they are cordierite shelves, and they're generally pretty accommodating with stuff like that, however I would do a 3 hour preheat to be safe. Better to lose 3 hours than to lose a kiln load.

You'll want to use a clay body that fully vitrifies, and I would go with 3/8" thick if they're over 4" wide.  If you're new to making tiles and aren't set up for making and firing them, doing an entire bathroom floor will be a major undertaking. Tile production is a different beast than making pots, and doing it efficiently requires different equipment and a different way of using studio and kiln space. You may want to consider using commercially available tiles for the bulk of the floor, and just make some accent tiles to personalize it.
Also, the process in that article may or may not work for you. Leaving tiles open on a slab of drywall may or may not allow them to dry without warping. It all depends on your clay body and the humidity level in your studio. With a heavily grogged clay they will be more likely to remain flat, but that type of clay may not be appropriate for the type of tiles you're making. If you're doing any carving then you'll want a smooth body, and they will be more likely to warp. The thickness of your tiles will also affect how easily they warp. Try making a batch and see how it goes. You'll have to figure out what works for your situation.

You'll want to use a clay body that fully vitrifies, and I would go with 3/8" thick if they're over 4" wide.  If you're new to making tiles and aren't set up for making and firing them, doing an entire bathroom floor will be a major undertaking. Tile production is a different beast than making pots, and doing it efficiently requires different equipment and a different way of using studio and kiln space. You may want to consider using commercially available tiles for the bulk of the floor, and just make some accent tiles to personalize it.
Also, the process in that article may or may not work for you. Leaving tiles open on a slab of drywall may or may not allow them to dry without warping. It all depends on your clay body and the humidity level in your studio. With a heavily grogged clay they will be more likely to remain flat, but that type of clay may not be appropriate for the type of tiles you're making. If you're doing any carving then you'll want a smooth body, and they will be more likely to warp. The thickness of your tiles will also affect how easily they warp. Try making a batch and see how it goes. You'll have to figure out what works for your situation.

Sounds like they are cordierite shelves, and they're generally pretty accommodating with stuff like that, however I would do a 3 hour preheat to be safe. Better to lose 3 hours than to lose a kiln load.

Sounds like they are cordierite shelves, and they're generally pretty accommodating with stuff like that, however I would do a 3 hour preheat to be safe. Better to lose 3 hours than to lose a kiln load.

Sounds like it's probably clogged up inside. Time to take it apart.

Yes, Skutt sent me a new wheelhead. The one I had was drilled wrong. Definitely a noticeable difference in the fit to the wheelhead shaft. 

I customer once gave me a wall-mount Orton digital controller system. I hooked it up to my old manual test kiln and I've been using it for almost 10 years now.

Use a mixture of fireclay and silica sand, 50/50 by volume.  Mix it up into a slurry and trowel into the gaps.

If you know it's firing hot, then it would be worth your time to run an empty load with cones and get it dialed in so you don't have to watch it. It may take a couple of firings, but it'll be worth it in the long run to be able to trust your controller.

I do all my underglaze work on greenware (the dry side of leather hard), because I also do mishima work on everything, which requires the pot to be soft enough to carve lines. Plus the underglazes I use (Speedball) take glaze better if they've gone through a bisque firing. If I wasn't doing mishima I'd apply my underglazes at bone dry, because they dry faster than at leather hard and you can wipe/scrape off mistakes much easier than on bisque. On bisque some colors will stain the clay enough that you can't get it completely clean.

Some underglazes don't take dipping glazes very well unless you bisque fire them before glazing. Speedball underglazes are like that. If it looked like your glaze covered well when you applied it, then things will be fine unless you fired too fast for your clay and glazes liking. The problem is that if you go too fast, the glaze starts to melt before there has been sufficient time for the organics to burn out of the clay, and those gasses can get trapped in the clay and cause bubbling.

In addition to the glaze maybe not being compatible, underglazes generally need at least 2-3 coats to show up well. If you're applying to bone dry ware you can probably get away with 2, but if you're applying to leather hard, you will need 3-4 coats to get good coverage, depending on the color.

You should be able to drill it without removing it, but you'll want to inspect the underside of the wheelhead to make sure you're not hitting any ridges or anything on the underside. To make the holes, center up a bat on the wheelhead, hold it secure and use a sharpie to mark the holes. Then use a center punch to mark the center of each hole. If you don't have a center punch then use a hammer and nail to make a small dent in the center of each mark. That little dent will keep the drill bit from drifting as you start to drill. Make a pilot hole using a small bit, like 3/32", then go to the 1/4" bit for the final hole. Make sure you stay perpendicular to the wheel as you drill.

I think that in the earlier days of cone 5/6 work this was true to some extent, but not any more. The development and marketing of cone 6 glazes prior to 7-8 years ago was very much geared toward making imitations of classic cone 10 glazes. I think this approach was a bad way to do it, though, because it classified cone 6 work as something that was less desirable. It was the poor man's cone 10. It was something you were forced to to if you didn't have access to a gas kiln- the realm of hobby potters, not professionals. However in the last 7-8 years, things have changed considerably. Now cone 6 work very much stands on its own, and is likely more common than cone 10 not just among hobbyists but also professionals.
Plus you can't just drop some boron into a cone 10 glaze and have a cone 6 version. Most all classic cone 10 glazes were fired in reduction, and reducing the melt is only part of the process. Mimicking the look of reduction requires additional changes in chemistry and often makes it impossible to make an equivalent cone 6 version, otherwise we'd have cone 6 shino and tenmoku glazes that are indistinguishable from their cone 10 versions, which is not the case. Since the glaze manufacturers embraced cone 6 glaze chemistry as its own thing and started to explore what could really be done with that chemistry, we have seen some really amazing glazes come to market. The variety of cone 6 glazes now dwarfs what has been been done in cone 10 work.
Personally, when I made the switch from cone 10 to cone 6, I approached it from the standpoint of modifying my tried and true cone 10 glazes. I quickly realized that I was taking the wrong approach. I find cone 6 formulation the be very different than cone 10 formulation, mostly because materials like frits are very powerful compared to most of the standard materials we use at cone 10. It still blows my mind that we can make glossy glazes with 24% EPK in the recipe. Plus the color palette that we can do at cone 6 is huge, and easier since we can use stains that aren't stable at higher temps. I actually find cone 6 formulation to be easier than cone 10.
Why cone 6? No idea. However if we really wanted to conserve energy and extend the life of our kilns, we would be firing at cone 3. We can still make vitrified bodies using feldspar at cone 3, and element life would be fabulous, probably 200 firings instead of 150. If I was working alone and didn't have a community studio, I would develop a cone 3 porcelain and glazes. There's no reason not to. I think we're probably stuck at cone 6 for a good long time, though, because we are at the mercy of the commercial suppliers, and they've got a good thing going at cone 6. I hope that we'll see more schools switch from cone 10 reduction to cone 6, because that is what most of their students are going to be doing when they graduate. They could still use their gas kilns, but cut their firing costs in half.
Sorry for the long post. I spent my first 16 years in pottery working at cone 10, and the last 14 years have been at cone 6, so I have a lot of opinions on the subject. I could write pages and pages about it! Switching to cone 6 electric was the best thing I've done for both my business and the development of my work, but I totally get why cone 10 gas firing is better for some people.
 

Skutt bricks line up pretty good. You may have to file down the end of a groove slightly to get them to line up perfectly, but they'll work once you pin the element. Make sure you get the correct thickness of brick, either 2.5" or 3".

You can burn it in a metal can or grill, but you'll find that you have to burn a lot of anything to make a worthwhile amount of ash.  Ash weighs very little, so making enough for a recipe like Nuka that uses 30% will take a whole lot of rice husks. You'll need several pounds of ash to make a 5 gallon bucket of glaze.

Most coatings do not bond well to old bricks, especially if there are already at the point of flaking, so I would talk to the ITC folks before doing anything. I don't think the heat reflection should be significant enough to cause any problems, especially since the lid is a major source of heat loss to begin with, and ITC isn't as glorious as some make it out to be.
If you didn't thin out the cement before applying it, it will definitely flake. It needs to go on very thin when you coat the lid.
If your floor slab is in good condition then you could swap it with the lid.
The simplest solution is to put a shelf at the very top of the load to block any crumbs.
Keep a look out for an old used cheap kiln that has a good slab you can use. A new slab will cost you $400-600 with shipping, so finding a used one is a good way to go.

Air pockets of any size will not cause explosions. Air doesn't increase in volume enough to blow apart clay. However with a closed piece, whether completely closed or with a pin hole, it can take a really long time for it to dry completely because there's little to no air flow on the inside. It can be bone dry on the outside and still leather hard on the interior. So you need to dry it for a long time and do a good long preheat in the kiln to make sure it's totally dry before taking the temp up. Otherwise you risk steam explosions. This is why people think you can't fire a closed form. They think it's dry (but it's not), it blows up, must be because it was closed! Nope. You can fire a totally closed hollow piece just fine, it just takes forever to dry out. The pin hole will relieve air pressure building up in the piece as it shrinks during drying and firing, which can cause distortion in clay bodies like porcelain, which soften up during glaze firing. I've seen porcelain pots inflate slightly during glaze firing due to the air pressure.

Air pockets of any size will not cause explosions. Air doesn't increase in volume enough to blow apart clay. However with a closed piece, whether completely closed or with a pin hole, it can take a really long time for it to dry completely because there's little to no air flow on the inside. It can be bone dry on the outside and still leather hard on the interior. So you need to dry it for a long time and do a good long preheat in the kiln to make sure it's totally dry before taking the temp up. Otherwise you risk steam explosions. This is why people think you can't fire a closed form. They think it's dry (but it's not), it blows up, must be because it was closed! Nope. You can fire a totally closed hollow piece just fine, it just takes forever to dry out. The pin hole will relieve air pressure building up in the piece as it shrinks during drying and firing, which can cause distortion in clay bodies like porcelain, which soften up during glaze firing. I've seen porcelain pots inflate slightly during glaze firing due to the air pressure.

To some degree, but not as much as you would expect. In a typical firing it's really negligible. On the Genesis you can download firing data that has a data sample every 30 seconds. I've looked at both SSR and mechanical relay firings on my kilns and while the SSR firings tend to follow the traveling set point almost exactly, rarely deviating and never more than 1 degree, the mechanical relays tend to stay within 3-4 degrees, which is plenty tight for your typical pottery firing. I've also checked firing costs on both, and it only fluctuates by a few cents. If temperature control was a real issue with the mechanical relays, I would expect to see the kiln working harder to keep up with the set point and also working harder to maintain evenness. But the firing cost doesn't show any significant difference. That said, those were in typical firings. If you were doing firings that required greater control, like say crystalline glaze schedules which have lots of holds and ups and downs, I would expect the tighter control of the SSR to be able to respond and make those changes more quickly and efficiently.
This is definitely worth it if you build your own system. If you're paying for the upgrade from the factory you have to math out the cost benefit.  If you use the kiln a lot and take care of it, you can get 2000 firings out of a kiln, which means about 10 relay changes over the lifespan. If you get your relays online you'll pay about $20 per relay with shipping, so the total cost comes out to about $600 over the life of the kiln. So if the SSR upgrade cost is less than that then you're coming out ahead. Factor in time spent on repairs and it's even better, although it only takes about 5 minutes to change out the relays. If you're a casual kiln user who's only going to do 500 firings over 20 years, an SSR upgrade probably won't pay off. You could just replace the mechanical relays every 150 firings and never really worry about them failing.
Above all else, the SSR system is REALLY COOL and everyone should have one.

Your kiln has 3 rings/sections, and each ring has two elements. Each element loops twice, so 4 rows of elements. Each ring of the kiln is connected to a relay, so 3 relays. The relays are what you hear clicking when the kiln is firing. They're just switches that send power to the elements. Because your kiln has both elements dead in one ring, you likely have a dead relay. If the problem was an element, then we would probably see only one dead element, because it's very rare for two elements to fail at the same time. Unplug the kiln and open up the control box and inspect for any obvious fried wiring connections. Then open up the panel in the control box to get to the internal wiring and relays. Again, check for any obvious fried connections. If everything looks good, then the relay for that section is likely the culprit. Because all 3 relays click at the same time, if one has died to to age, then the other two are probably close to dying as well, so you should replace all 3. You can either get them from Skutt, or source them yourself on the internet for a lower price. Just search for the part number on the relay.

Guys, I fixed it!!! After studying those drawings and looking at my wires I felt pretty confident I had found the problem. Took a chance and it's now fully back to operational! Thanks for all the support! Time for a bisque fire tomorrow!