Firing Manual Kiln with Dial

[Katarina]

Hi everyone, 

Just writing to see if anyone has some tips/advice for a potential firing schedule for my manual kiln. 

I have a Wenger Webcot kiln with a dial going from 0 - 100. 

I bought a thermocouple that I will attach to my digital meter to keep track of the temperature.

I would like  to fire to aprox 1150'C.

I wonder if I should start on 10 for maybe an hour, then move to 20 another hour and slowly take it up from there? After which temperature can I go faster up? 

Thanks for any help!  

[Sorcery]

Found an older thread on it that died with no answers. 

No manual available for download?

I'd sit with it and the pyro and learn what each increment does.

Sorce

[Dick White]

It sounds like the "dial" is an infinite switch. The dial increments are whatever the kiln manufacturer decided to print on the metal, but the switches are all the same. Some are marked 1 to 10, others (like yours) are 1-100. The way the switches work is at a low number, the switch is on for a short time (several seconds) and off for a much longer time. As the switch is turned up, the on interval gets longer and the off interval gets shorter. At the highest number, it is full  on. With a full kiln, a schedule of a 10 (the lowest) until no more steam comes out of a peephole, then 20 for an hour, then 40 or 50 for an hour, and then 100 until it is done. If you are tracking firing speed by temperature, 100C is when any water in the raw clay or glaze will turn to steam and explode, so be sure everything is merely warm until it is dry. For a bisque firing, the clay goes through a stage chemically bound water release around 4-500C, so slow down there. And then there is a short period of silica inversion around 650C that should be taken slowly. Finally, you want the last 2 hours of the firing to run at about 60C per hour into your target temperature.