I've caught the flu, so I haven't been able to work on the kiln near as much as I wanted to in the last few days. But it doesn't really matter since I'm waiting for the elements so I can grind the grooves, and the steel panel for the floor support. I want to have the steel panel to do the mortaring with, I'm having it cut from some mild steel at a local water jet shop. But, I thought that before that happens I could at least rough out the bricks for the floor so that the mortaring is a little quicker.
In this picture you can see the rough layout for the floor, 42
bricks. The green circle drawn on the bricks is the same diameter as
the outside of the wall bricks. The fibre will wrap both the wall and
the floor. The plan from this point on is to rough cut the bricks with
a hack saw to roughly approximate a circle. Then at a later date when
I have the steel I will mortar the floor bricks together, after curing
only then will the bricks be ground to a good circle.
The first step was to cut off the ends of the excess bricks. I used a square to mark out the exact cut that was needed, then cut the brick with my hacksaw. Obviously the hacksaw doesn't do a very good job, but that doesn't matter, we're going to clean it up later.
The cutoffs aresufficient to use to fill in the missing space. So the layout of 42 bricks above is sufficient for the floor. After a lot of cutting, and a bit of shaping I had a roughed out floor.
