Bill Kielb

Impressive -all! Glaze is fantastic

Impressive -all! Glaze is fantastic

Great question. I was fortunate enough to take my work bench on the road to build a bench for a friend which went to sofa and sold  successfully for at least four figures. Loved her art and glad it sold! Feel good about the bench as it had to support at least three hundred pounds without deflection to crack any of her tiles. Fun project and success always makes the labor part forgettable. Picture of it going to its new owner attached.
December project (s)
Complete a couple glaze formulations to work well over heavy underglaze on  low expansion porcelain.  Test are going well and should be able to publish after the first of the year.
Additional December project was to get at least four basic throwing videos done for newbies in the studio. Three done so far so we will just keep plugging along.
last project was to begin creating a glaze workshop for the resident artist at the studio. Just beginning this one and have outlined it. Thus far I like the direction and content.
 

Glazing for this weekend firing. Opps. 
 

Great question. I was fortunate enough to take my work bench on the road to build a bench for a friend which went to sofa and sold  successfully for at least four figures. Loved her art and glad it sold! Feel good about the bench as it had to support at least three hundred pounds without deflection to crack any of her tiles. Fun project and success always makes the labor part forgettable. Picture of it going to its new owner attached.
December project (s)
Complete a couple glaze formulations to work well over heavy underglaze on  low expansion porcelain.  Test are going well and should be able to publish after the first of the year.
Additional December project was to get at least four basic throwing videos done for newbies in the studio. Three done so far so we will just keep plugging along.
last project was to begin creating a glaze workshop for the resident artist at the studio. Just beginning this one and have outlined it. Thus far I like the direction and content.
 

Hi Bill,
Cool project! and great to meet you.  That looks like a lot of work too!  So, you're regulating a gas kiln!  What kind of regulator/actuator do you use to control the gas pressure?
My kiln is an old Skutt kiln sitter so it is electric. I hope to have the kiln firing in the next two weeks.  We'll see how busy things get with the holidays coming up.
 
Thanks for the suggestion on Bartlett schedules. I'll check them out. I've found a couple schedules and they all advocate a slow approach to the final temperature.  I plan to soak for as long as it takes for the witness cone to reach 90.
 
Everything in the project is released under the gnu gpl license, so liability will not be an issue for me (as far as others using the code or ideas in github).  If I was to implement this for say... a school... especially if I charged for my work, I could be held liable... but this is my personal kiln.

Thanks with regards to safety.  I'll continue to use both the kiln sitter (with one cone above intended firing temp), and safety timer so that I don't burn down the house.  When solid state relays fail, they usually fail with a short circuit... so the kiln get's full power.  The safety I have in place today is...

1. warning if temp is N degrees outside of schedule
2. software shutdown if max temp limit is reached
3. kiln sitter
4. kiln timer
and of course walking down to the basement to check near end of schedule
 
 

I like your idea. Did the same for a studio in Illinois and they get great use in teaching. One thought, I created it with PLC so fairly cheap, off the shelf, web enabled, remote enabled, data storage ........ blah, blah, blah. But less time developing!
I chose to make them control their kiln manually as they reduction fire and the accuracy, liability and cost for accurate feedback in an old kiln was unacceptable to me. As a teaching and learning aid I have found it vastly superior.
if firing an electric, then likely no issues and knowing PID programming will likely make this very accurate. I did some research on correlation with cones and can say that the last 200- 250 degrees of firing controlled rate approach is likely the simplest in my view. Look at the Bartlett schedules, they have done this for so long they really simplified this.  You might get some ideas.
With respect to liability, it is a real valid concern in my view.
 

I got tired with going down to the basement to make sure my kiln was working properly and running on schedule so I started (forked) a project to control my KS-1018 using a raspberry pi. With this I can:
monitor my kiln from anywhere using any device that has a web browser (phone/tablet/computer) easily create new schedules, edit existing schedules, including infinite ramps & soaks accurate PID control get schedule cost estimates and actuals If anyone is interested, here is the github link... https://github.com/jbruce12000/kiln-controller
The cost for everything I bought was under $200.00, but my time investment has been high.  Again, this is for geeks that were born with a soldering iron in one hand.