SOME NOTES on STACKING THE GLAZE KILN

So you keep the shelves from touching the back wall and
stagger them vertically; you put the bulkier pieces in the
middle, tapering off to smaller ones at the edges, and have
a finger-width between all pots. What more can you do?

Some years ago, when I was wrestling inch-thick silicon car-
bide shelves in and out of the kiln, I began to think about the
amount of space the shelves took and even worked it out - it
came to nearly 10% of the available space in a typical firing,
I wondered more though, about the effect of so much dense
material on the rate of climb of the heat.

Shelf-cleaning is an unpopular and time-consuming job and
there is usually more of it in a school than in a production
pottery. To save the shelves we began using clay discs be-
neath each piece, and this in turn suggested how fewer shel-
ves could be used to hold the same number of pots. Taller
posts, and the pieces overlapping each other, supported on
short posts and clay discs, thus:

(turn to centre page)

iz.