ever so slowly. And that's OK.
I had a little set-back this evening. I loaded the kiln for a glaze firing, got it going... and about an hour or so in I decided to take a peek in the bottom peephole, just to see if the coils were warming up properly. Well... it appeared that they were not. The top set of elements were glowing a beautiful reddish orange, and there was a nice glow rising in the kiln, but then I realized that the bottom elements were not cranking it out like the top ones. Bummer. Both sets of elements were on high by that time, but they were clearly not performing at the same rate. After some internal debate, I opted to shut it down for the night, and check it in the morning. That didn't last long. I went back out after the elements had darkened, and fired up the bottom pair of elements only, and son-of-a-gun if I didn't see a faint glow building in the kiln, through the peephole. So I cranked it back up (it was still very hot, so I wasn't too concerned about thermal shock at that point). We'll see how it goes. Looks like I will be up for a while longer. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that it will work, and I'll have some nice, glazed pots by the end of the weekend. I guess I'll know for sure tomorrow afternoon.
The kiln sitter dropped at a few minutes after midnight. Everything seemed to work the way it's supposed to. I guess it was just messing with me. Hmmmmm. It's 8:00am now, so it's still got some cooling to do.
ReplyDeleteUnloaded the kiln this afternoon, and everything looks good for the most part! It was a successful firing, despite the glitch last night. I will post some pictures soon. I did learn that even though the Spectrum glaze jar says to brush on their glaze... that might not be the best idea, unless you have a super soft brush that leaves no streaks. Probably the worst thing I can find in these pots, is that on several of them there are very distict brush streaks in the fired glaze. Other than that, I am pretty pleased with the results, and I learned a lot in the process.
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