Hi, I’m Catharine Healy and this is my kiln. It's a 40 cubic foot gas reduction kiln. It's all dry stack fire brick. I have approximately 11-12 foot hard brick chimney out back I can show you also. This right here is called a car kiln because the actual floor of the kiln and the door rolls out and when you push it back in it fits exactly. It's designed that way and right here is the floor of the kiln and so I can ... Whatever pieces I make ... The rule is I can't make any pieces bigger than this kiln, okay? So this is my only limitation but I may have pieces this big and pieces that big or little guys and so you have these little kiln furniture, they're called stilts, and you put those as needed for the height of the piece and then you put shelves on and then you keep on stacking them.
On either side in the back of the kiln. There are burner access holes and the burner actually, the flame shoots in these holes, comes all the way down this wall. We have created what they call a bag wall, so it's a little tiny partial wall and it hits a target brick which causes the flame to rise up and roll around in the arch, this [inaudible 00:01:42] arch. It rolls around and the most important thing is that your flame keeps on moving. The atmosphere of the kiln moves and it has air which causes it to move so it takes about ten hours to fire this kiln and a certain degrees Fahrenheit, usually about 1800 degrees Fahrenheit.
You actually put a damper in a little bit and you guys out there that have smoked meat or something, you know you have to kind of starve the oxygen down a little bit but you push the damper in and then it puts it in a reduction process. What's beautiful about reduction is the flame goes inside of the piece of pottery, the glazes, and it looks [inaudible 00:02:33] and what happens is it leaves a mark, it leaves marks when it tries to do that. It's really cool. So that's why I went to the trouble to build this kind of kiln. So we're so excited because our first firing is actually next Wednesday and this has been a long time coming and it's here, it's ready to roll.
