The school year has started-do these 3 things before your first kiln firing
Get your electric kiln ready for the school year by clearing out your kiln room, checking the inside of the kiln, and cleaning up those kiln shelves!
Tidy the kiln room
A quick and easy step to ensure you are ready to fire those first clay projects is to tidy and organize the kiln room! Clear out any old, broken, or unclaimed pottery that is tucked into the corners. Get rid of any broken equipment, trash, or overstock of buckets that somehow accumulated. Make up replacement peeps out of clay and add water to that dried-up kiln wash.
Store kiln shelves in a designated area on end to help prevent chipping and cracking. Shelves tend to warp over time and get glaze on them, causing them to not lay flat. Having a sturdy rack to slide the shelves into is the best option for ease of picking the next shelf and not having to worry when they don’t lay flat.
Sweep and Check Elements
Sweeping your electric kiln can go a long way to extend the life of your elements. Use a shop vacuum or handheld sweeper and be sure to sweep along all the element grooves and the floor of your kiln. Little bits of ceramic debris against the elements can cause uneven heating and wear each time your kiln is fired.
Take precautions when sweeping to keep the sweeper hose away from your computer box on your electric kiln! Sweepers generate static and the transfer of static electricity to the computer can cause damage. An easy preventative is to be sure to leave computer electric kilns plugged in while sweeping because the electrical setup will ground any additional surges.
Do a quick inspection of elements, ensuring they are all sitting inside the channels in the soft brick. If any heating elements are sagging or popping out you will want to be sure to address this before firing otherwise the element will continue to stretch and break.
Gently push on the coil and if it can be set back into the channel without resistance, do so. If the element wants to pop back out insert an element pin (wire specifically sold for element installation) to hold it in place. If there is resistance and you have to apply force to get the element back into place, don’t! The element most likely got stretched where it is hanging out of the channel and due to heating and cooling during firing the wire became brittle and will break under pressure. So to get it back where it belongs you will want to follow these steps:
Grab a torch and heat the area that is out of place till glowing red. Take pliers (my favorite are small round-nose pliers) and gently compress the coils back to about a 1/16” space. As you compress the coils the element will shorten and fit more snugly in its channel. You can use element pins to help hold it in place. If the soft brick has broken and the channel is exposed you can use the pins to create a fence until the soft brick is replaced. While doing this repair you can inspect the elements for areas the coil has collapsed and adjust those too, just remember to heat the coil beforehand to make the wire malleable!
Clean Kiln Shelves
If you are anything like me I always procrastinate cleaning my kiln shelves! I go out of my way to prevent ever having to clean them by knowing my glazes, washing my shelves, and monitoring my kiln temperatures but when dealing with students and studio artists mishaps will inevitably happen. So grab some safety glasses and let’s get to work.
A masonry chisel and hammer will go a long way to chipping off small beads of glaze. Lay the chisel on the shelf and lift just enough to rest on the glaze drip, keeping the angle from the shelf to the chisel small. Lightly tap the end of the chisel with a hammer. Voila! The glaze will hopefully pop right off. A couple of things to note, always chisel towards center mass so as not to break off chunks of the shelf, and never hammer straight down on a chisel perpendicular to the shelf or it will crack.
A silicon carbide rub brick is like a giant sandpaper stone that works well for knocking off small drips of glaze and sanding glaze off of the sides of a shelf. They are cheaply bought at home improvement stores and are a must-have for your toolbox.
Using an angle grinder with a masonry disk is for those jobs that are a total mess. Any shelves with a sheet of glaze or multiple large sections of glaze are best cared for by an angle grinder. Be careful to only put light downward pressure while grinding to not take huge chunks out of your shelves.
Remember to kiln wash one side of your shelves to ease in the removal of glaze and don’t forget to wear safety glasses and a mask when grinding, sanding, or chipping glaze off shelves!!
These are simple, easy steps to make the school year go smoothly. Don’t wait last minute, when all the projects are on shelves ready to go and you realize you have no clean shelves and a bunch of stuff in the way!
