Stories
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The price was something I could not pass up and would be the only way I could obtain a kiln of this size, which was something like 36 inches in width and 50 inches high. It fired to earthenware temperature of about two-thousand degrees. So I may have gotten it for one-tenth the price. Of course there was the moral dilemma but it was taken from a store and one would assume it was insured or at least this is a most often used excuse concerning theft. However there was karma involved. Because it did not come with a manual and no one knew how to use the automatic kiln shut-off, it got blown up, meaning left on beyond its melting maturation point, so that everything melted into glass goop.
It happened a couple of times and on at least two occasions I had to change the electric coils and much of the brick. When renting space one gives out a key to the door. At a later time some perturbed sole, probably a guy that I had kicked out of the shop, snuck in one middle of the night, threw open the kiln door, a feat in itself with that kind of white heat, for someone perhaps who knew what they were doing and left the kiln door open. That destroyed at least the ware that was inside but think it did little damage to the kiln itself.
So we put a shop together. I built two wheels and eventually four. We had the long work and the big wedging table. I built a plaster drying slab about four feet long two feet wide as a drying table to recycle unfired clay, that is dissolved in water and laid out on plaster, which absorbs the water and stiffens the clay to the desired consistency by length of lay-out.
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