Kiln Building: Part Two
In May 2025, two months after building kilns for the very first time in Oxford, I got the call from Jack to hurry down to Brighton and join him and Pippa (another friend from our Oxford kiln course) build another fast fire kiln at the Ecomusicology Project, based at Stanmer Organics.
Brighton is my home town, but I am a little out of the loop since I haven’t lived there in 17 years. I had never been to Stanmer Organics, which is where the Ecomusicology Project is situated. It’s a wild area divided into plots near Stanmer Village. The plot is run by Graham, who has quite the job on his hands of keeping the whole thing running with the help of volunteers.
Graham had been lucky enough to procure a whole load of used pottery equipment from Freecycle, including soft kiln bricks, shelves, furniture and a gas kiln (truly an exceptional haul)! And the rest of the materials were sourced by Jack.
We set about doing the whole build in one day, and the first part of the day was spent simply lugging bricks from our cars onto the site. The next part of the day was building!
It was excellent to repeat the process we has learnt, and without too much time passing so that our minds were still attuned to the process. We all had pictures and notes to refer back to, which came is handy!
The whole build was fairly smooth going but we did run into a few issues. Firstly, we did not have an angle grinder. Or rather, we did, but we couldn’t change the blade. Eventually, we unstuck the blade and it was possible to change it HOWEVER, we didn’t have the correct blade for cutting bricks. This resulted in a lot of time spent trying to split bricks with a chisel.
Another problem was that Jack hadn’t ordered quite enough fireclay for the mortar. This turned out okay though, as he simply asked our mentor Claude the best solution and Claude suggested just using any old reclaim as a substitute. We used Reduction St Thomas reclaim from Jack’s studio, a pricey material, which was a bit harder to mix as it wasn’t in powdered form but ultimately did the job.
The next challenge came when Pippa realised the sand we were mixing into the mortar was building sand and not silica sand. This was a problem as there was a rick that the sand we were using could explode when reaching the high temperatures necessary for wood firing. So, I suggested we break up some of the kiln bricks into grog and mix that in instead, which resulted in me crushing bricks on a stone in the woods like early man. See below pic!
Once the firebox was made, the whole thing came together quickly. We decided to get the structure totally finished off and Jack would finish off the finer details later (spyholes, pyrometer etc) as our collective energy was starting to wain. The kiln looked superb and the following week Jack fired it with great success!
