neilestrick

1. Turn on the bottom switch, with the lid cracked about an inch or two, for 1 hour.
2. Close the lid. Wait 1 hour.
3. Turn on the second switch up from the bottom, wait 1 hour.
4. Turn on the next switch, wait 1 hour.
5. Turn on the top switch, wait for the cone to bend and the Sitter to shut off.
Your Kiln Sitter does not have a backup timer, so I strongly recommend getting a digital pyrometer so you can track the temperature and make sure it doesn't over-fire. Sitters are known to stick occasionally, so always be there to check the pyrometer and make sure it shut off when it was supposed to. Any digital pyrometer with a heavy duty type K thermocouple LIKE THIS will work. Looks like you have a blank ring also? If you add that onto the kiln, the max temp of the kiln will only be about cone 1.  Without the blank ring it'll get to cone 8, so suitable for cone 6 work.

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.

We are permitted to create pottery at the mercy of our industrial overlords.

I think you were on the Europe site.  The US site still has all the names you're used to. There's a little flag icon in the top right corner to toggle between the sites.
Watts don't matter, HP doesn't matter. Torque is what matters, however nobody lists actual torque numbers. The closest we get to torque numbers is centering capacity. Can a tabletop wheel center 22 pounds? Probably not very well. Can a regular wheel center 200 pounds? Probably not very well. But they can all center 25% of that just fine. Brent switched to listing what the clay can handle 'continuously' rather than centering capacity, so that further complicates things. I think they only want you to compare their wheels to their other wheels, not to other brands. But who cares if a wheel can spin 225 pounds? Nobody does that. It's all about torque. I wish there was a standardized, real number system for rating wheels. Even centering capacity is subjective.

I trim a foot ring into the bottom of every pot that I'm able to. Some form make it too difficult to impossible, but I avoid a flat bottom whenever I can. It just looks more finished.

That's a great view @LeeU! Unfortunately, I don't have any windows in my studio. But during the warmer months I open up the overhead door and get a lot of fresh air and sunlight. And a view of the parking lot!

I trim a foot ring into the bottom of every pot that I'm able to. Some form make it too difficult to impossible, but I avoid a flat bottom whenever I can. It just looks more finished.

I have also been a big supporter of the beveled undercut on the bottoms of forms. I find that even a flat bottomed form benefits from a 1/4" beveled undercut on the bottom of the pot for several reasons: 
The bevel at the bottom makes an easier clean up job for glaze when cleaning to fire for glaze firing. The undercut  hides the unglazed area of the pot The undercut also separates the pot from the table, an aesthetic thing IMHO easy and quickly done before cutting from the wheel, or when trimming. best,
Pres

I trim a foot ring into the bottom of every pot that I'm able to. Some form make it too difficult to impossible, but I avoid a flat bottom whenever I can. It just looks more finished.

We had snow in the Chicago area on Thursday morning. Then I headed to Michigan in the afternoon where we had flurries all afternoon, and woke up to more than an inch on Friday morning. It's mostly melted now, though. The farmhouse I'm staying at abuts a forest preserve, and we've had up to 20 deer at a time hanging out at the edge of the yard. 

A bisque to cone 04 will be fine. You don't need to do the long 'first firing' program you did when you first got the kiln.

@ElisaAnne21 The J18 has been awesome! It is the perfect size for my level of production as a hobbyist. It easily gets to the temperature I need (cone 6). I've fired it 15 times in the last 11 months (of which 2 firings had problems - see below). 
One thing I really like is that because it's so old, the technology is relatively straightforward. Recently, two of the infinite switches on the controller failed. It took a few firings that tripped the kiln sitter faster than expected for me to realize that rather than cycling the elements on and off, they were on full-blast at any position of the dial other than 0. With some super helpful advice and encouragement from @neilestrick , I bought replacement switches on eBay and swapped out the old ones. With the new switches, I realized that when someone says "two hours on low" it can mean very different things for different kilns!  I have to turn the new switches to "3" (which is almost at "M") to be roughly equivalent to "Lo" on the original switches. 
I continually fantasize about buying a digital controller, but I am holding off because I appreciate that the kiln's manual everything forces me (a beginner who had previously never fired a kiln) to pay attention to the different choices I make and how they affect the outcomes.
Would love to hear how your kiln works out!

If you don't have one, get a pyrometer so you can check the rate of climb after you make adjustments. Also remember that with many kilns, a very small adjustment to the damper can have a very large effect, so make small adjustments, like 1cm at a time, and give it a minute or two to adjust to the new settings before assessing the results making further changes.

If you don't have one, get a pyrometer so you can check the rate of climb after you make adjustments. Also remember that with many kilns, a very small adjustment to the damper can have a very large effect, so make small adjustments, like 1cm at a time, and give it a minute or two to adjust to the new settings before assessing the results making further changes.

$650 is a fair price even if some of the switches need replacing. Chances are everything works fine since it hasn't been fired much.

Hi, I have most of the bricks, fiber insulation, kiln furniture, etc. from the kiln's previous incarnation.  The arch and floor and partial chimney are hard brick with some soft brick and fiber for insulation.  I will buy more fiber and maybe some vermiculite for added insulation.  I see a piece of corrugated culvert pipe in the woods behind my house could be chimney material. I have a friend with an auto repair business who can supply drain oil. I also need a system to transport the oil.  I am using ideas from Dennis Park's " A Potters Guide to Raw Glazing and Oil Firing." Also Fred Olsen's "The Kiln Book." The original kiln was built in 1978 and then built again in 1982.
David Earley
 

I know that kiln shelves make great pizza stones, but I'm not sure about the other way around. Pizza stones seem like they are finer grained and/or tighter than kiln shelves, but I could be wrong and it may depend on the brand of shelf.  In a kiln that size I think I would be more willing to try it than in a larger kiln, but I think I would just do a bisque firing with it first to see how it holds up.

About 40 minutes. It's an easy drive, never any bad traffic since it's all interstate highways in the 'burbs. I don't mind going there because near it is a Japanese market that has really good carry-out sushi. I always time my trip so I can get lunch there.

I think the small Peter Puggers would only be good for recycling your daily (weekly?) trimmings, not for mixing fresh clay from dry powder.  10-15 pounds at a time seems like a real waste of time for making new clay. I would only do that in bigger batches. But for tossing in you trimmings and scraps and pugging out a few pounds every day or two it sounds lovely.

I think the small Peter Puggers would only be good for recycling your daily (weekly?) trimmings, not for mixing fresh clay from dry powder.  10-15 pounds at a time seems like a real waste of time for making new clay. I would only do that in bigger batches. But for tossing in you trimmings and scraps and pugging out a few pounds every day or two it sounds lovely.

Yes, and it works great. In mixing mode the auger pushes the clay toward the back of the machine. Once it's all mixed, you turn on the vacuum, hit the switch for pugging, and the auger turns the other direction and pushes it out the nozzle. You don't have to dig it out.

Yes, and it works great. In mixing mode the auger pushes the clay toward the back of the machine. Once it's all mixed, you turn on the vacuum, hit the switch for pugging, and the auger turns the other direction and pushes it out the nozzle. You don't have to dig it out.

About 40 minutes. It's an easy drive, never any bad traffic since it's all interstate highways in the 'burbs. I don't mind going there because near it is a Japanese market that has really good carry-out sushi. I always time my trip so I can get lunch there.

About 40 minutes. It's an easy drive, never any bad traffic since it's all interstate highways in the 'burbs. I don't mind going there because near it is a Japanese market that has really good carry-out sushi. I always time my trip so I can get lunch there.

IMO, all pugmills are a pain to clean.
In the big picture, I don't think that recycling is worth the time and money unless you're doing it on a fairly large scale. If you look at the value of the clay and your time, you're going to have to run A LOT of clay through that machine for it to pay off. Like years and years of clay. Personally, I'd rather spend my time making pots, not recycling clay. Say you go through 2,000 pounds of clay a year, which would be a lot of clay for most hobbyists, and trimmings make up 15% of that, you've got 300 pounds of clay to recycle each year. That's about $135 worth of clay that you're recovering. On a $5000 pugger it's going to take 37 years for the pugger to pay off. If you go through 5,000 pounds of clay per year, it's going to take about 15 years. Add in the value of your time and you're probably losing money on the deal. In the amount of time it would take for me to recycle 300 pounds of clay, I can throw a lot more than $135 worth of pots. Throw away your trimmings or donate them to someone who wants them, and spend your time making pots. IMO the only reason for a hobbyist to have a pugmill is if you need it for wedging purposes, as it will prevent a lot of wear and tear on your wrists. But for recycling I think it's a waste of time and money for most people.