New kiln - Furniture?

[Pyewackette]

So I'm awaiting the quote on my new little kiln (L&L e18S-3).

I'm going to be getting Advancer shelves for that but those don't come with any other furniture so I'm wondering what I need to get in that vein.  I wasn't planning on getting the furniture kit that goes with that because - Advancer shelves.  But I have no idea what furniture I would need to get separately, and not knowing that, I don't know if it makes sense to get the kit and just not use the shelves very much (maybe just for bisque firing?) or just the furniture separately.

Any advice?

[neilestrick]

For a small kiln you could get by with the Small Post Kit from L&L. But if you're going to get a bigger kiln later go ahead and get a Large Post Kit.

[Denice]

Years ago I bought a crummy used kiln because it came with boxes and boxes of new  6 and 8 inch posts and a couple of shelves.   I used our tile saw and cut the posts into lengths that I needed  and threw away the kiln.     I have a test kiln that I ordered,  it has a interior dimension of 6"x6" square,  the kit had 2 shelves and eight small posts for $90.00.  This was twenty years ago,  the kiln was only $300.   I  bought a rectangular shelf from my local Ceramic supplier for $30 and cut it into 4 full and 4 half shelf's.   You can find posts at estate sales,  often they sell them separately from the kiln.     Denice

[Pyewackette]

Hmm, so how breakable are these?  Given I have tile-on-slab floors and I'm old and sort of dropsy.

Also how much space under the bottom shelf?  The L&L "load yer kiln" video uses 1" but would the 1/2" do?

And which do you prefer, square or triangular posts?

Also - what about stilts?

How much space should you leave between the top of your top level of pots and the kiln lid?

I'm pretty sure I need extras of several kiln post sizes.  I've been checking my pots and it seems I have an innate preference for throwing things that are between 3.75" and 4" tall.  In fact I have several pieces that are the same height and they weren't even thrown in the same MONTH, let alone the same day LOL! I'm nowhere near as precise with the stuff I've thrown off the hump of late, but my individual stuff seems to mostly be in that range for height.  If I put 1/2" spacers under the bottom shelf, and using the 5/16" Advancer shelves, I can get 3 shelves of my "usual" height yunomis and bowls and one more shelf with 3.025" to the top of the lid.  

I don't imagine I would have a LOT of need for 3" tall pots (or less) but test tiles maybe?  Cookies?  Flat things.  So I should probably at LEAST get some extra posts to enable me to stack like that.  Still working it out ...

[Pyewackette]

Here's a partial lineup, going from exactly 3" to exactly 4".  Well as exact as *I* can tell with my aged astigmatic eyes.

All of these were early glazing attempts, when I had been told NOT to wet my pots and to ignore runs and pinholes.  Now I ignore that advice LOL! 

I don't have a single glazed piece back yet where I've done it otherwise so I guess we'll see.  They just got around to glaze firing stuff from weeks and months ago - one piece of mine had been sitting on the glaze shelf since November!!!

The purple is a lot prettier in person and the middle two pieces are a lot uglier (to my mind).  The picture shows it more brown but in reality it is more of a muddy olive.  It looks quite different if you can get that glaze on thin enough.   I'm pretty sure that's the bucket of stuff that hadn't been stirred properly in - well - EVER I'm guessing, there was so much settled at the bottom.

I really need to get a hydrometer.

Anyway that is a representative sample of the sizes I most frequently throw ATM.

[Dick White]

Skip the hydrometer if you are firing to cone 6. Hydrometers are accurate only at cone 10. That probably sounds like a large pile of horse puckies, eh? But hear me out. At cone 6, many glaze recipes contain a fair amount of gerstley borate, to encourage melting at the lower temperature. Gerstley is notorious for several things - being fickle, and being very thixotropic. The thixotropy means you have to seriously stir the glaze to liquify it, and then it quickly goes back to a gelled state. In its gelled state, you can put a hydrometer at any depth you want and it will stay there. The specific gravity can (and will) be anything you want.

Instead, take a run down the big river in South American dot come and invest in a few 100ml veterinary/garden fertilizer syringes. Don't get the 60s. Tare your trusty digital scale with the empty syringe, snarf up 100 ml in the syringe, and weigh it again. The numbers on the scale is the specific gravity.

At cone 10, there is almost no thixotropic Gerstley. Then a hydrometer will float properly.

[Pyewackette]

@Dick White I was just reading all about thixotropy.  Well maybe not ALL.  But lots.

That guy says the same thing - skip the hydrometer and just weigh and find the ratio.  Eventually I'll be making my own glazes so an accurate scale is on the list anyway.  I've got two cheap baker's scales (packed somewhere) but neither is particularly accurate for Mad Chemistry Experimentation.  I need to get the American Weigh Scale LB-3000 Scale with bowl, max 3KG with 0.1g accuracy for glazes and  the Accuteck ShipPro Postal Scale max 110lbs (50kg) with .1 oz (2.8g) accuracy for the big stuff.

The former is currently in my cart.  I'll be adding stuff for measuring specific gravity as soon as I figure out just what. I'm going to go out on a limb and guess I can get some of the ginormous syringes at the local feed store.  I've probably got several - packed SOMEWHERE.  I've had dogs and horses off and on for decades and I tend to keep stuff like that because IT WILL BE USEFUL SOME DAY. But I lost so much stuff in the move, who knows what I still have.  And even if they are packed somewhere - well lets just say a trip to the feed store is in the cards. 

BTW one of our glazes, called "Snow", is supposedly cone 6 OR cone 10.  At Cone 10 when I used it it crazed on the inside of the cup, but apparently if its situated right in the kiln at cone 10 reduction, it should turn an even toasty coppery brown.  I got spots like that but mostly it crazed and turned sort of grey instead of white.  But with a glaze called Green Celadon over it, it came out a nice purple with white speckles.  The problem is the stuff is SO FREAKIN' THICK.  I tried to use it the other day and I had to wash it off, its so thick.  Either its dehydrated over time, or somebody added something to it. ARGH! A hydrometer would definitely NOT float in that stuff.  It would stand up straight as a flagpole.

Well possibly that's a tad hyperbolic.  But not by much. I've got to figure out how to "fix" it (or some of it rather, I don't muck with buckets full of glaze, unlike SOME people) and to do that finding the specific gravity is a start.

 

[Pyewackette]

So I think I have an answer to at least one of my questions - height of the bottom posts.  According to

Quote

 if you have an undermounted vent (I don't) then you need to prop up the bottom shelf on 1 inch posts to allow air flow to the vent.

So I guess that's an inch not a half inch, which would leave me ever so slightly more than 2.5" at the top in my stacking scenario. 

Also also somewhere I asked about how well the Advancer shelves would fit because they are 15" octagons and the L&L e18S-3 was supposedly also 15" inside.  Turns out (big surprise) I read that wrong.  It is 16.5" inside so those shelves will fit with finger-room to spare.

[Dick White]

On the hydrometers, or rather now, the scales. Don't get the big postal scale, the smaller one will do. It measures up to 3 kilos at a reasonable accuracy (1/10g) for batches. You will be measuring only one ingredient at a time. It's unlikely that you will have a recipe and batch size that will require more than 3 kilos of any one ingredient. And even then, the problem is a bowl big enough to hold that much fluffy white powder. The only thing you would do with the 50 lb. postal scale is mixing your own clay bodies.

The feed store is a good source for the big syringes. Here in the city, we don't have useful feed stores. Be sure to get one that holds at least 100 ml. Bigger is ok, but not the 60 ml ones. The math only works at 100 ml. Or rather, no math is needed at 100; the 60 requires math and that's work. 100 ml of glaze weighs xyz grams - xyz is the specific gravity.

Regarding that mucky glaze. Get a specific gravity and adjust that first. I like my dipping glazes to be in the 145 range, though a few are a bit higher or lower. Then adjust viscosity with a flocculant (a few teaspoons of saturated epsom salts) to thicken up to just the right creaminess or a deflocculant (a few teaspoons of saturated soda ash, or some like Darvan) if it is too thick.

And yeah, I know all about losing stuff in a move. We "lost" our entire set of good silverware. A year and half later, when finally hanging the last of our pictures, we found the silverware in a box marked "pictures." We had gone back to the old house for several trips and reused the boxes. Duh...

[Pyewackette]

2 hours ago, Dick White said:

The only thing you would do with the 50 lb. postal scale is mixing your own clay bodies.

Well yeah!!  

https://insight-live.com/insight/share.php?z=No2m98AEhJ

https://insight-live.com/insight/share.php?z=5R9GFgEEYF

Don't forget mailing pots.

Many moves ago, the movers stole all my construction tools - and my pottery tools, which were in a regular toolbox.  I'm pretty sure they were disappointed when they popped that puppy open only to find weird plastic things and other pottery notions and sundries.  But not half as disappointed as I was to realize they'd gotten a couple thousand dollars worth of DeWalt construction tools.

[Hulk]

I'm getting by with a 2k gram scale, uhm, 4.4 pounds; it's small, handy, cheap, consistent.
Good point on packages, have been rounding up a bit the bathroom scale difference, which reads to 1/5 pound.

[Mark C.]

14 hours ago, Dick White said:

 

Instead, take a run down the big river in South American dot come and invest in a few 100ml veterinary/garden fertilizer syringes. Don't get the 60s. Tare your trusty digital scale with the empty syringe, snarf up 100 ml in the syringe, and weigh it again. The numbers on the scale is the specific gravity.

 

I'm a cone 10 guy and I use the syringe and digital sacle as it more acurate and its also pretty fast

[Pyewackette]

Re posts:  I'm thinking in that small kiln - maybe the 1/2" posts under the bottom shelf for bisque, and 1" for glazes?  My theory being that the kiln venting is less burdensome during bisque than glazing ...

[neilestrick]

1 hour ago, Pyewackette said:

Re posts:  I'm thinking in that small kiln - maybe the 1/2" posts under the bottom shelf for bisque, and 1" for glazes?  My theory being that the kiln venting is less burdensome during bisque than glazing ...

1/2" is fine for everything.

[Mark C.]

54 minutes ago, neilestrick said:

1/2" is fine for everything.

Ya that

[Denice]

Posts tend to chip at the edges,  eventually they get too broken up to work.   This is when I get our my tile saw and cut the post just a little shorter,  you need to cut off several so you will a matching lengths for a firing.  I have a rubber mat in my kiln room when I load the kiln this helps reduce breakage.    It is just a section of the gray exercise mat that fits together.   I remove it  when I start  the firing.   Our $40 tile saw was from Harbor Freight was our only saw for years,  we recently bought a big tile saw but still use the small one for odd jobs.  Denice