For the last couple of days, I've been slowly but steadily mortaring
the floor together. It's almost done. Two more mortaring sessions, so
it will be ready to sand and install before next weekend. In
anticipation of that I tore down my old kiln and set up for the new
one.
This basically meant completely ripping out my my old vent and completely reinstalling it. The old kiln will be turned into a raku kiln at my friend Z's house. It's gone!
I tore everything down, and decided to completely rebuild the diffuser. I had an extra floor heating register vent, so I decided to use that instead of the homebrew diffuser. I also went and got a piece of scrap plate steel from a local yard, and had it cut into a 34 inch circle. I could have cut the circle myself with my angle grinder, but I didn't want to piss the neighbours off even more. So I paid $20 to have Aquashear (a local water jet shop) cut it for me.
The first image shows the finished install. I had to adjust the lengths of all the pipes so that the kiln was in the right spot. Even the dryer vent had to be taken out. It was kind of a major pain in the a$$, and I ended up suffering my first injury on this project, drilling into my finger ... don't ask.
This kiln will be a lot bigger than the old one, I had to extend the diffuser intake a lot so that the valve is conviently located, but none of the job is difficult.
After this was all done, I went looking at pots with my teacher. He exposed me to clay 20 years ago, and we're still great friends. In fact he helped me a lot attaching the diffuser to the plate steel. It would have been a pita without a second hand.
The weekend of work ended by cutting out a circle of M-Board for the
kiln to rest on. I want to be able to shut this kiln off and have it
cool slowly. I don't want to fire down - still have the elements
powered while it's cooling. So, the whole kiln is 5.5 inches of
insulation. The walls will be backed up with fibre, but for the floor
and ceiling I elected to use M-Board. I scribed a 32 inch circle out
of two adjoining boards, and then had at them with the jig saw.
The dust from M-Board is very aggravating to the skin. If you've installed fibreglass insulation ... this is very similar. Wear a long sleeve shirt when you're cutting this stuff. Of course, wear the respirator too. The dust isn't flying all over like with IFB so I didn't use the shop-vac to collect dust. This is partly due to the fact that with the jig saw you can slow the speed down greatly.
Damage so far:
| elements and stuff | $200 |
| bricks | $450 |
| 6 tubes cement | $36 |
| steel base | $27 |
| 2 sheets M-Board | $100 |
| total | $813 |
