Mobilization

My terrific aunt April sold me her trailer. It's a small steel flat bet with two wooden panels in the floor. I'm putting two cattle panel pieces in place of the wood and building the kiln in the back of the trailer. I have yet to decide how the floor/door is going to be built and I'm running out of time. I need to get it built and start making pots.

The decisions still to be made:

Floor brick:

• High duty firebrick
• Silicon Carbide

I have both of these available to me at the moment for a good price. I would like SiC to try them out more than anything. 

Car Kiln Cart/Standard floor:

I could build this either way. I have the materials available to me to build the cart, I'm just not sure I want to mess with it on my first ever real kiln build of my own. If I'd done it in previous kiln building workshops I'd feel more comfortable. Either way I'm going to essentially have the same materials, just arranged differently.

Burners:

I've been toying with the idea of actually throwing, or molding some fire clay burners. I've got loads of high refractory fire clay and grog that I'm going to mix for the saggars anyway. I have enough clay to build a small kiln out of it, and at the price of it I probably should do just that for my next project which will be a soda kiln.

I could easy enough go get some black metal pipe, cut it to length, rig up the oil line and air and spend my time tuning them instead of going through the effort of making them from scratch materials. It would be smart to do both I guess then I get burners for sure either way. Never heard a potter crying because he had too many burners laying around.

I have however decided to go with a compressed air system after all. The blowers are fairly cheap, but the compressor does double duty and I'm running lower and lower on funds for the project. Purchasing a compressor seems like the smart thing to do considering how much I'll use it for glaze application anyway.

To sum up:

This downdraft kiln will be a cattle panel frame, fiber blanket kiln on the back of a flat bed trailer with compressed air, vegetable oil powered burners, and it will either be a car kiln or a standard floor with a swing open door that bolts shut. Either way it will most likely have SiC brick floor to test it out prior to building a full SiC wood kiln/soda in the future. This future project will most likely be a pellet/oil kiln and not actually wood. I've been toying around with recycled fuel pellets and I aim to come up with a working kiln based on them in the coming year.