kiln

The maiden voyage of the Uber-Blend 5000 Turbo

 I acquired this piece of machinery, the Uber Blend 5000 Turbo, from a kindergarten that had used it for mixing large batches of powdered milk. It is basically just a very heavy motor suspended beneath a large reservoir, driving some wicked looking 4 inch wide mixer blades. It is so heavy that it needs its own frame to support it and stand it up. When mixing is done, the entire reservoir can be tipped down to decant the contents.

I’ve been doing lots of glazing this last week, and decided at the last minute to test a new glaze in the upcoming firing. This glaze is basically just stamped feldspar and ash, in a 9 to 1 ratio. Anyway, mixing up this stamped feldspar is always a time consuming, tiring affair, because it comes in cakes straight from the filter press, and is like a stiff clay. Getting this to melt in water is tough. If you let it dry completely, as I have started doing, it gets rock hard, but is easy to break into smaller chunks. I’d been slaking these small chunks in water over a period of days or weeks to prepare it for thorough blending with a drill mixer, but this time I had the Uber-Blend 5000 Turbo!

Here are some of the chunks of Taishu feldspar. These were the smaller ones, measuring a couple of cm across. The largest chunks were up to about 7cm.

The Uber-Blend 5000 Turbo, in all of its sleek elegance. It is an absolute chick-magnet. With this baby parked in the studio, who needs a Lamborghini?

This is 9kg of spar and 1kg of ash turned almost instantly to smooth, silky glaze, requiring NO screening. There were a few tiny lumps left after the initial 30 seconds, an additional 5 minutes of uber blending and they were history too…

And in conclusion:  IN YER FACE, Magic Bullet!

Happy potting everyone.

Some more improvements

The first firing showed some of the flaws in the stoke hole cover for the front of the kiln, the first being not enough extra overlap around the edges, and the second more dramatic one being the loosening of the frame in the heat, causing the cover to fall out of its frame in the middle of the firing, which was an exciting event.

I cast a new, larger cover for the front stoke, and moved the original to the rear chamber stoke hole, where it is looking quite sharp and happy. The implementation of the frame for the front stoke was done a bit differently, just to see how it plays. I think it will be more stable, balanced and less likely to come apart during firing. At some point, I’d like to do a welded door, but for now this will work.

Here is the cover assembly. I had to drill holes for the rods, but it allows for the angle iron to be oriented across the center line of the slab.

 Detail of the angle iron, threaded rod, and shims. My plan is that the shims  allow for the angle iron to be tightened to a slight bow, and hence to be in a state of tension, so that when the frame heats up in the firing, there may/will be a loss of tension, but the frame will remain tight and secure around the slab.

 Here it is hanging in place. Twisted 2.1mm stainless iwire on the cover assembly. 3.2mm stainless wire twisted around another threaded rod, connected from the overhead beam. In the first firing there was no discernible softening or stretch in the wire (2.1mm) from the heat, so this 3.2mm wire should last a good long time.

The next improvement is by mother nature, who is giving us our first really good bunch of wisteria blossoms:

The coverage is a little sparse, but with a few good prunings over the next couple of years, this little gal should fill in nicely. I’ll post pictures again when the blossoms are in full bloom.