January 04th, 2016

The December firing was a good one. 3 days total.
We fired through five chords of mixed wood; pine, mulberry, black locust, maple and honey locust.  We saved a stock pile of honey locust for the finish.  Turns out that we fire with a different mix of woods each firing; and each wood has particular burn characteristics.  It does make things a bit tricky...especially when a new wood is introduced.  We had never fired with honey locust before; but I had noticed that its heat index is very high and we were thrilled to have a good bit of it  (1.5 chords) to bring the kiln chamber to it's max temp.  What happened baffled us for a bit.  There was low pressure over the kiln for the last day and the honey locust embers built up both in the firebox and below the firebox something fierce.  We tried to increase the draft by plugging passive dampers in the flue, opened up the ember box to max air, altered stoke patterns...nothing would get temp to the back of the kiln.  Would have been nice to have a chord of thin-split pine for that!  Next time for sure and from now on.  The front and middle hit cone 10 plus and the few pieces we've pulled already show spectacular results. At the end, the near white heat indicated plenty of temp. There may be a few re-fires this time but from what we can see so far, the atmosphere of super heavy reduction was good for shino crystalization and flashing...we've seen some beautiful chocolate flashing on several different clay bodies.  Can't wait to get at the rest!
Stephen Rodriguez shared a couple new glaze recipes with me for this firing and I'll post them once we've seen the overall results.  
Will continue this post after the unload.