Saturday 13 June 2009

Friday grinding

Matt and I spent the last couple of days working out how to construct the oil drum bottle kiln.

It's essentially an oil drum, lined with ceramic fibre, which is then placed on top of a simple firebox, built from firebrick, with two horizontally opposed fireboxes.

The pots will be contained within a stack of saggars, which were formerly the property of and made by the deft hand of the late, great, Michael Cardew - I'm not entirely sure he'd approve.

Whether it will work or not remains to be seen when we give it its solo firing at the Cotswolds Slipware Workshop at Taena next weekend.



As you can see, health and safety procedures were strictly adhered too......



...and in the event of a lack of goggles, we skillfully constructed some from packaging saved from a packet of paintbrushes.

Our new recycle-friendly 'greengogs' not only protect ones eyes, but enable the user to smoke whilst operating machinery due to the strategically placed hole in their fabric. This makes these not simply a great item for puffing whilst angle grinding, but also a fantastic gift for the inexperienced or first time smoker, preventing cigarette emissions from entering the users eyes. Health and safety first folks.

11 comments:

Jude said...

Excellant!!

Brad Lail said...

I have got to get me a pair of those!!

Paul Jessop said...

You should get a Knight Hood for this in the Birthday Honours List.
Not only are you saving the planet by recycling plastic packaging, but you are also helping to keep the UK tobacco industry alive.

Very Funny Indeed Chaps
keep up the good work.

Peter said...

What fun! It will be really interesting to see how the little kiln fires. I recently found an article in a ceramics magazine about someone who makes wood fired kilns out of ceramic fiber lined metal dustbins. They seemed to work well.

grimmo said...

Hey Doug, I think you should have taken the BRUSH out first!!!!!

doug Fitch said...

Ha ha, nice one Mr G!!

Anonymous said...

hilarious... gotta get some of the greengogs!

Hollis Engley said...

You know, we get sandwich take-out containers that would work very nicely as face protection during wood-firing and glaze-mixing. I have no idea why that thought never occurred to me until now.

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Kent Harris said...

Do they also make GreenGogs for firing as well. They could be called the Stoker-Smokers.

Anonymous said...

Hi you may want to view video of a similar barrel/drum kiln found under the title of "Ceramic wood fired barrel kiln" It was fire the Summer of 2008. We use four drums.
geo