Playing with Fire

I've always been intrigued by fire, and it awesome power. I've experienced first hand it's capacity to kill and destroy; I've also seen it's power to create; starting with very primitive bonfire firing of pottery before being introduced to that I was mainly restricted to my electric kiln, this past year I helped A friend fire his two chamber wood kiln, it was quite eye opening and a lot of work; I even was introduced to Don Reitz, and helped stoke his much larger train kiln. Lately however I'm feeling the desire to experience the same primal experience of harnessing such energy, to do so, I've begun exploring kiln building. When I first became interested in ceramics, my aunt Ellen sent me a book from when she was into the craft: Daniel Rhodes' KILNS. I was only eighteen then and it was pretty overwhelming at first. The book is pretty extensive of that day's kiln technology and many things haven't changed all that much, but other things are a little harder to obtain nowadays. I saw an old gas kiln at an estate sale and figured even if it's junk I'll learn something destroying it.

It's a little Dickinson muffle kiln, and I'm in the process of the trying to resurrect it as safely as I can without throwing too much money into it. So far it's been interesting trying to get advice since very few people want to take on the liability I had to drive quite a way but eventually found a knowledgeable person willing to resize the orifices to lp and give me some added insight. But so far in my testing I've only been able to determine my safety valve isn't all that safe and the regulator I'm using is giving me way too much pressure, that I haven't tried the main burners, only the pilot. the safety valve was pretty leaky which is perhaps the reason it was discarded. I tried the pilot and it was hesitant to stay lit, When I opened the valve for the rack, the water shot out of the manometer cutting the experiment short there. I kind of gave up then. But I may still play with it so long as anything I buy for it can be easily salvaged and used on a future kiln.

I'll try to update this as I go and perhaps get some pics of my "progress"