Soda Kiln Adventures...

So bit by bit I am learning to do other things besides throwing. I can make glazes, frankly as a cook that  is way easy. Very little is a new skill if you can bake.
Below you can see my ash glaze. Simon Leach has a traditional (for the leach family) ash glaze that is simply ash and ball clay (50/50).  Now based on my research I believe that both the ash and ball clay will melt enough at a ^6 for us to actually use this glaze at that heat level.  This is the test.

This is made up of ball clay and ash from my wood burning stove as well as washed wood ash that was donated.  We sieved this after it was made to create a smooth glaze, thick as cream. If this does not work I will then start adding small amount of frit to lower the melting temperature until this works.  I have no desire to go off of some ash glaze recipe that has a ton of ingredients, there really is no purpose to this silliness.

Today I ran, with Kuky, the gas soda kiln.  I think at this point I can do this alone. I want to have a go at the glaze kiln and the bisque at least one more time with help before I fire those alone. I need to create better notes about how to use the electric kiln they have. Frankly I have a better grasp of using the old style with the kiln sitter than the fully electronic version.

You can see some pix of the kiln at different stages. For Soda we use Baking Soda.  This time we are using foil filled with soda. We did a hold at ^010 for an hour in reduction, ended reduction until (theoretically) ^6 at which point we were going to add the soda and hold in reduction for an hour.

If you don't know... propane, if left open for a long time, starts to freeze. It is very cold as a gas and this can lead to "stalling". This means less gas comes out. So with a long fire you can have this issue. Solutions vary but without a yoke it really leads to a lot of kicking and running water.  Now the old kiln   sitter is still a part of the inside of this old electric kiln. We put in a ^6 cone in it, and knew that we could at least see from the outside that it had "dropped". Because it is not really attached this does nothing to the kiln, but it allows us to see it. We are now calling this our "blind cone".

There was stalling and using the thermocouple we had hit a solid ^5 but could not get beyond this and the temp dropped. We decided to declare this the top range and added the soda foils at that point. In the past we have sprayed. The glazes were a Shino and the Ash Glaze we created.  These glazes are reduction glazes for ^6. We were not happy we could not get it up any higher and then noticed... the Blind Cone had fallen...

Cone is a measure of "heat work" that is both temp and time verses a simple temp #. We had enough time that we had actually reached ^6.  We counted the time since the soda was added and then after an hour of reduction we cut the heat and sealed the kiln. Thats were it is right now... our surprises waiting...