Today I began building the ceiling. I'm much better at it now, and the
job is going be much nicer than the floor. First step of course was
laying out the floor. The problem was that I didn't have a template
for the circle. I took the two pieces of M-Board and laid them top of
the kiln as it is now, and drew a circle from underneath. Then laid
out the bricks on that circle.
At this point, I just scribed lines up the faces using a square. To cut the bricks I switched to the drywall sall. It has a much larger kerf, so the waste is more, but that didn't make a difference. It's much easier to cut the brick with it than the hack saw I used before.
I know that the circle that I scribed on the M-Board is bigger than the actual circle the ceiling will be, so I just cut straight lines across the bricks. On the more curve bricks, I went a little wider, and sanded down the curve. All in all, a much better job than the first go round with the floor.
I'm going to cement the slab up, and then sand the outside to a nice
smooth circle. I contoured the outside of the floor bricks using my
table saw as a grinder with the masonary disk and eyeballing it. I
have much more control this way, less dust, and I'm sure it will look
better since the sanding will be to the monolithic slab, not each
individual brick.
As you can see ... a much nicer job.
I right away started in with cementing the rows together. This was
such a joy! When I mortared the floor the first time I was very
frustrated. Maybe even swearing a little. This was relaxed and
leisurely. All the rows wet together beautifully and lined up
nicely. No waste at all, just perfect. I only had to redo one join as
it took me a little too long to get them in the right position. In the
picture you can't see any mortar smeared all over the bricks like with
the floor. Much neater, the seams are tighter, and no mess. If you
want my advice don't use mortar.
I convinced myself to leave the bricks alone, and went to the studio to think about what to do next. After some thought I went shopping. Rivet tool, 3 dozen 3/16th inch rivets 7 pipe clamps. I've never used a riveter in my life. But, it's pretty easy. It might be a quirk of the tool that I bought, but I found you need to be careful how much you cam the tool each squeeze. If you do it too much too soon then the tool crimps off the nail and the rivet isn't as tight as it could be. So, do a bunch of short squeezes until it gets really tight, then squeeze harder to crimp off the nail.
In the previous installment I mentioned that I intended to have a welder come and install everything onto the kiln for me. Well, I learned a little bit about welding, and there's no way to weld 8 gauge to 20 gauge without burning through the 20 gauge. At least that's what I was told. So I decided to rivet after all.
There really isn't much to show here, but there's a pic. Just drill
the holes through the pipe clamps (after you snipped them in half),
then align them on the skin, drill through the skin and pop the rivet
in. The local kiln builder told me that it's really important to make
sure you have the pipe clamps perfectly aligned and parallel, and
aligned with the skin, otherwise when you tighten them you will buckle
the skin. And one piece of advice I can is ... make sure that you
tighten up your pipe clamps a bit before putting them on. This way you
have some room to loosen them off in case you need to loosen the skin
at some point.
And, here's the finished job:
Damage so far:
| elements and stuff | $200 |
| bricks | $450 |
| 6 tubes cement | $36 |
| steel base | $27 |
| 4 sheets M-Board | $100 |
| 107x28 inches 20 gauge aluminium | $90 |
| Tool, rivets, clamps | $65 |
| total | $1068 |
