M2 Crafts

We've Moved

We've Moved February 6, 2012

The year 2011 was quiet for us. We did do some markets, but we didn't announce them, as we weren't sure if we would be able to attend for sure. The reason is that we spent most of our time in the spring and summer looking for a new house, and selling our old one.

We wanted to finally pursue our dream and buy a small farm. We now have a small acreage where we're raising chickens, goats and bees (so far). When we first arrived we planted 100 heads of garlic which we plan to sell. One of our beehives died in the cold, but the other is going strong, and on warm days they're even foraging for pollen.

We will still be making soap, and pottery, but as yet we're unsure where. You may see us at the Haney farmers market.

Last Markets of 2010

Last Markets of 2010 October 3, 2010

Next weekend will be our last markets of the year. We will be in Burnaby on Saturday, and Ambleside on Sunday.

Here are some of the products that we'll be selling. I spent the afternoon glazing some pots, here they are before firing - actually, they still need more glazing which I'll do tomorrow. And, also, some of our soaps curing on our wall-o-soap.

First Lonsdale Market

First Lonsdale Market July 8, 2010

This Saturday will be our first appearance at the Lonsdale market since October 2008. We took last year off and concentrated on the Burnaby market each Saturday. To mark the occasion, Michelle made a patterned soap which she's never made before. As with all our bars, these will sell for $4 a bar.

From 10am until 3pm you'll find us on the concourse outside the Lonsdale Quay, see you there.

First Markets 2010

First Markets 2010 June 23, 2010

We have finally had our first markets of 2010. This year we have decided to return to Ambleside. Last year we only did Burnaby, this year we will be alternating Burnaby and Lonsdale on Saturdays, and Sundays in Ambleside. You can find our schedule here.

Here's a nice picture of a small porcelain bowl on display.

First Firing

First Firing April 15, 2006

Success. I fired yesterday for the first time. It was an unqualified success.

My previous kiln would take a very long time to reach cone 6. I couldn't follow that schedule. In fact, my kiln maxed out at 1185C usually when it cone 6. With this new kiln it was easy to follow the schedule from M^6G

This firing cost $1.87, that's about half the cost of firing my old kiln. And this kiln is twice as big in volume. I only had to use full power between 900C and 1100C, after that it was lower amounts to get the correct rate. And to hold at 1200C it only took 75% power. When I started cooling, I had to turn it down right away to 42%. By the time it reached 900C I only had one circuit on the lowest position. I elected to turn it off as an experiment to see how fast it would cool naturally. It cooled a bit faster than the red line, but not that much.

So, I have to say this is a very good kiln. I'm glad I made it that much more efficient.

Element Oxidizing

Element Oxidizing April 13, 2006

So, after installing the hinge, I had to fire the kiln to oxidize the elements. Euclid recommended 8 hours at 1080C to do this. I didn't quite go that long, oh well.

But boy did it stink.

But I had been warned that elements do smell the first time that they are turned on. So I wasn't too concerned. But it really smelled. The whole neighbourhood could probably smell it, and was no doubt wondering what the hell was going on.

So, not much to say. I played around with different power levels to figure out what kind of power I need to affect a certain rate. And learned how much power is required to hold at around 1100C. I was very pleasantly surprised that my kiln appears to have plenty of power. WAY more power than my old kiln. My old Olympic wasn't even close to being able to match the cone 6 schedule recommended by Roy & Hesselberth, but this kiln will be able to no problems at all. I just wonder if the elements in that kiln really needed replacing. Probably.

When I opened the kiln the next morning. It was still at 300C after 14 hours of cooling. (A very good sign.) I noticed something disturbing.

It appears that the M-Board smoldered. This was not a good sign. In fact it was really stressfull. I had a full sheet of M-Board under the kiln and it would be VERY difficult to remove it if I had to.

I immediately appealed to clayart and the collected wisdom of the contributers.

Here is the thread, so you too can learn about M-Board.

So my fears were allayed. But not in time for me to decide that the M-Board had to go. Even if it was fine (and rationally I suspected it had to be), I just didn't like seeing brown like that.

So, I used a couple of left over bricks and made a one inch thick ring of IFB to support the back of the kiln. It worked so well that I elected to do the whole kiln. So, now the top course of the kiln has IFB all the way to the aluminium skin. This has three beneficial affects, first it looks better, second it covers the fibre (protecting me from it) and third allows the skin to apply tension to the top course of bricks and keep them tight and secure. Of course this ring of IFB replaced the M-Board piece that I used around the peephole opening too.

In order to make these curved pieces, I traced the arc out on the IFB and then used my jig saw to cut them. It definitely worked well enough. Not as precise as the ground bricks, but certainly good enough. For the mitres between the bricks, I just eyeballed it by hand. Absolute precision isn't required here.

The Hinge

The Hinge April 12, 2006

I finally got the hinge on Wednesday, and set about immediately to write this page. It's quite hefty. I would say it weighs about 20 lbs. I elected to design it such that it would be mounted to the lid, and to a structure which was bolted to the wall. This is different from most kiln lids. The hing usually is also attached to the kiln body. But because my lid is so heavy, I didn't want to stress the body of the kiln too much.

The first step was attaching it to the kiln lid. At first I was very concerned about alignment, and getting it just right, but then I realized that this wasn't necessary. I could just tweak the skin. All I had to do was bolt it to the skin relatively accurately, and then just move the aluminium skin a tiny bit to get it perfect. That made it considerably easier. Also, I elected to use bolts instead of rivets. Moreover, I put a second sheet of 22 gauge steel between the aluminium and the washers. I had it, so I thought I may as well.

At this point, I thought I was home free. I just used some more of that cedar which was ideal, thick, and wide. I anchored a large slab to the studs and a smaller piece to the hinge, I used lag bolts for the hinge side, but elected to go with 4" #8 screws. Lots of them. Between the two I used three pieces of 2x6 for bracing, and a length piece to secure it to. I seemed good to go. Unfortunately, the kiln lid when lifted and lowered, put too much stress on the back bricks. They kept getting pushed back into the fibre and out of alignment. And they kept getting damaged.

I wasn't exactly sure what to do. If the hinge worked perfectly (and I had it mounted perfectly) it shouldn't really do that. But I knew that the sheer weight of it and the flexibility of the wood means that perfection is quite unlikely. I tweaked my wood mount a bit so that the hinge was slightly open. Not a good solution since it means the lid will be pulling against the screws when down and probably making it looser over time. This did solve the problem though.

The bricks were still getting pushed out of alignment a little though. And that bothered me greatly. That's when I had a brilliant idea. I cut a one inch wide circular section of M-Board to fit between the skin and the brick. This allowed the tension of the skin to directly apply itself to the back bricks without being absorbed by the compressible fibre. This worked perfectly, and I was happy. I also had to trim the skin a bit so that it didn't dig into the M-Board.

Unfortunately I didn't take a picture of the M-Board circular section at this point. I thought I could always take it later. You'll find out later why that wasn't true. I'm a bit behind in putting up these updates. So read on to find out about the M-Board.

Damage so far:

elements and stuff	$200
bricks	$450
6 tubes cement	$36
steel base	$27
2 sheets M-Board	$100
107x28 inches 20 gauge aluminium	$90
Electrical box	$50
Table leg	$5
Hinge	$250
total	$1473

Rounding The Lid

Rounding The Lid April 8, 2006

It was really starting to bother me that the lid was perfectly round. It really doesn't make a difference other than aesthetic. Since I'm waiting on some fabrication for the lid hinge, I decided to try to figure out how to cut the lid into a better circle.

I decided to use my circular saw. (It had to be the circular saw since I haven't used it yet on this project.) I have a small saw which only accepts 7.5 inch blades. So, that meant I would have to do the job in two passes, one from each side. (And still not get all the way through.) This was a bit of a problem since it meant finding the centre from both sides. I had to find the exact point above the point I used for the first side. I just did it with some really careful measuring. I used the same centre on the hot side as I did for the trimming, and noted that it was 1/2 inch to one side of a row of bricks. Then I just measured how far it was from each of the two ends on either side of that row. I used those measurements to find the analogous centre point on the cold face.

So, the very first step here was to replace the saw blade with a grinding disk. Fortunately I didn't have to buy one. Then it was time to figure out how to do it. Of course, I could just do it freehand, but I didn't give myself very good odds at doing very well that way. I played around a bit trying to attach a swing arm to the table of the saw, or replacing it all together, but, then the blade would not cut deep enough for my satisfaction. I elected to make a jig in which the saw is held freehand in a cutout the shape of the table of the saw. This jig is then attached to the centre of the slab for the pivot. picture. I had to hold the saw in the correct position and rotate at the same time. It wasn't too tricky though.

It worked out pretty well. The two things that are important, is that you take into account the size of the saw table when you locate the hole in the jig (should be obvious), and that you align the hole with the centre of the blade. If you put the hole in the centre of the jig with the blade offset it makes it much more difficult to figure out how far the hole should be from the blade, plus the profile will be a scallop (I think) rather than a nice cut face.

I didn't get all the way through the lid on the second pass, but it was very easy to use the drywall saw and some sandpaper to smooth it up. It was very nice to put the aluminium back on and see a nice perfect circle.

Trimming The Ceiling

Trimming The Ceiling April 5, 2006

It's kind of ironic that only last week Belinda posted this to clayart. Ironic because two days ago after lots of sanding of the ceiling to try and flatten it, I moved it on the kiln. Um, it didn't fit so good.

None other than Arnold Howard confirmed that the method to use to flatten it is a big round piece of MDF with sandpaper glued to it. Presumably something like 50 grit. Unfortunately, I didn't believe that was an option for me, since the cement that I put into the grooves is so hard that it just tears the sandpaper.

I considered putting the lid on my Shimpo, and trimming it just like a pots foot, but I don't think I could tap-centre a one hundred pound slab.

Of course, I haven't used my router yet on this project. This seemed like a good opportunity to rectify that shortcoming. So I made this jig. The plan was to raise the aluminium skin on the lid so that the jig ran on it like on a pair of rails. The router would stick down and grind out a seat for the kiln walls. Perfectly flat. Unfortunately, the pop rivets prevent the skin from being raised up. Damn.

It's ok, using a big long piece of MDF like this pretty much averages the unevenness of the floor, damping out the hills and dips. The plan was to mount the router to the jig so the bit sticks through the big hole, and a nail in the lid would stick up through one of the small holes. Then just routing a circle out through a bunch of the little holes would grind out my seat.

My lid isn't very round. So, I had to find the centre of the lid. If you remember some grade 9 geometery that's pretty easy. Just get a string the length of the radius, and then scribe a circle arc from two places on the circles perimeter. Where they intersect is the centre. Unfortunately, the lid is not quite a circle, so after scribing about twenty arcs I had the centre surrounded.

It worked like a charm. Here's the result after a couple of passes. I didn't grind out too much so the dust wasn't too bad, but you should definitely still wear a mask. If you have a speed control for your router, I'd recommend it to cut down on the dust. Of course, you might want to use an old crappy bit, I don't think IFB is too good for the knives.

I haven't moved it to the kiln yet but I'm hopefull that it will fit like a glove.

Connection

Connection April 2, 2006

Obviously this was a very exciting two days. Saturday and Sunday my sparky friend and his dog came over and helped me connect the kiln to the electrons. I learned a lot, mostly because as I've said before I don't know much about electricty. There he is connecting the 8awg bx that I strung earlier that day to the box. You can see the element tails sticking out through the insulators.

Basically what it comes down to, is that for each pair of the elements, one tail must be connected to another tail from the other element. This is the series connection of the elements. That I understood. I did this after Sparky and the dog left. We'd spent Saturday dealing with cleaning up the sub-panel, and connecting the bx to its breaker.

Come Sunday I had connected all the series connections, and cut the wires for the switch connections. Sparky did the rest.

Here's a shot of the finished wiring, with a multimeter showing the ohms across the top pair of elements. If you go back to the designing the kiln page you'll see that I had asked for 12.8 ohm elements. So the reading should be 25.6. It shows 26.3, that may not sound like a lot, but it is. I've learned enough (see the electric update page) to know immediately that this difference infers a serious reduction in power.

I was pretty worried In fact we had previously measured the elements, each in turn, and they were 13.3 +- 1 with the exception of one which was 13.9. If you do the math (or run my program) you'll learn that that means about 8400 watts. Not good. Nothing to do about it though except send an email to Euclid inquiring about the discrepancy.

Of course, we had to check the resistance for the whole kiln.

So, if one knows the resistance, and the voltage, one can figure out the current...

volts = ohms * amps 240 / 6.9 = 34.7 Now ... that's a serious problem.

amps * volts = watts 34.7 * 240 = 8328 I was pretty pissed off. I presumed that Euclids had messed up.

But, of course, the multi-meter can be used to check amperage. We couldn't do this on the first day, all we could do was check the individual elements. Now that the kiln was wired up, the first thing we did was verify those readings. The 26.3 ohm reading confirmed yesterdays 13.3 ohm element average.

The amperage check showed something completely different though.

That reads 37.3 amps. That means 8952 watts. Much better. So, we ran the ohm meter across what should definitely be a 0 ohm circuit. It showed 0.6 ohms.

So it all made sense. The 0.2 amp drop is likely due to that one element that read as 13.9 ohms.

My kiln is a little underpowered according to the design but by only half a percent.

Of course, we had to turn all the elements to high. We let it sit for a few minutes feeling the warmth while drank some beer. In no time at all the pyrometer showed 80C without the lid on. I became happy.