Friday, November 06, 2009

PS after the firing

which took 29 hours and 23 minutes, I 'reviewed' the schedule (kiln still too hot to unload). I found that I had made a slight error when I entered the firing schedule...I thought I was telling the kiln to advance from 250F to 2000F at a rate of 300F/hr at which time it would advance at the rate of 108F to 2185F. But, unfortunately, I really told it to advance to 200F at a rate of 300F and then to advance to 2185F at a rate of 108F. Get it? The kiln crawled from 200F to 2185F at a rate of 108F per hour. Well, that does make for a long, slow firing! Once the kiln is empty I will fire it up again so I can see what the bottom element is doing. Hopefully, there is no problem with the elements--which are pretty new--and the whole problem was my careless mistake. Usually I 'review' the schedule if I change it--but not this time! I peeked in and saw that on the top shelf the self-supporting ^6 cone was bent to about 2:00. So I have yet to know what the rest of the kiln achieved. Stay tuned.

2 comments:

Marcia Selsor said...

Here's hoping you have some real gems fired that slow. However you probably won't want to repeat that schedule.
Keep us posted to the results...maybe some pictures.

Sister Creek Potter said...

Yes, I was very happy with several of the pieces in this firing. And NO I don't plan to repeat this 'experiment'! I did post some pictures in the next post.