Community kiln · North Fremantle · Gas reduction · 40 ft³
It reads the curve you give it, minute by minute, and hands back the truth at thirteen hundred degrees. Program the firing below. Then live with the pots.
Program the firingHow to read a kiln
A pyrometric cone bends when it has absorbed enough heat over enough time. Cone 10 falls at 1305 °C if you climb at sixty degrees an hour — sooner if you soak, later if you sprint. The controller below thinks the same way.
A firing is just segments: climb at a rate, hold at a temperature. Drag the points. Too steep before 600 °C and steam splits your ware; too timid at the top and the glazes never wake.
Everything. Underfire and tenmoku is dry rust. Overfire and it runs off the foot and welds the pot to the shelf. Copper red misses without its soak. That's the game, and the kiln always deals.
The instrument
Drag points · double-click a segment to add a step, a point to remove it · arrow keys nudge a focused point (shift for coarse)
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On the shelf this month
Iron-saturate. Black glass that breaks to rust wherever it thins — lips, ridges, the ghost of a fingermark. Fire it down slowly and it crystallises to tea-dust.
Two percent iron and a thousand years of practice. Underdone it's cloud; right, it's river-jade pooling in the carving. Past cone eleven it thins to mean glass.
The moody one. Chalk-white out of a timid kiln, carrot-orange out of a patient one, carbon-spotted if the flame finds it. Forgiving low, sulky high.
An oxblood with a window one cone wide. No soak at the top and the red greys out like a held breath. Hit it, and nothing else in the kiln matters.
The kiln itself
We fire on the last Saturday of every month, rain or shine, gas roaring from six in the morning until the cones say stop.
Bring your ware bisqued and your glaze wiped a finger-width off the foot — the shelf grinder is for emergencies, not habits. Someone always brings a plate for the table; someone always forgets to sign the firing log. Unloading is Sunday, eight sharp, and there is no feeling in ceramics like the first sight of a shelf you gambled on.
The little clay figure on the controller is the kiln god. He was made from the first bag of clay this studio ever opened, in 2011, and he has watched every firing since. Please him.