How to Make a DIY POTTERY KILN

hey guys so i just finished making this little updraft convection kiln in my backyard a lot of you have seen my previous video about building an adobe kiln if you haven't seen that one i'll put the link right up here for you so today i'm going to show you how i built this i'm going to go through step by step how i built this little kiln in my backyard how you can do the same in your yard [Music] making primitive pottery in an urban area can be really challenging sometimes when you're looking for a way to fire if you don't want to fire in a standard electric kiln i like to travel out to public lands where there's lots of firewood but that's not available to everybody not everybody lives someplace where there's a lot of public lands nearby where you can build fires or you might not even have a car you might rely on public transportation like a lot of people in urban areas do this a little convection kiln like this is a great opportunity for somebody that lives in an urban area to fire primitive pottery at home it doesn't take up much space it doesn't make a lot of open flames and smoke that will alert people or make people call the fire department and it works great so today i'm going to show you how i built this you may have seen the video where i make my previous kiln out of adobe and that was a good option for where i was in a semi-rural area i had lots of soil where i lived that i could use to build the kiln out of so the kiln cost me nothing in that case in this case i'm in the middle of tucson and i didn't have a lot of earth that i could use for making an adobe kiln my yard is pretty much landscape so i just can't dig a big hole in the middle of it so what i opted to do was use red bricks that i was able to get at home depot relatively inexpensively and then i laid those up with mud mortar so this used 107 bricks from home depot where they cost 50 cents a piece so not a lot of money so i drove to a place where i could safely dig clay and i used a bucket to measure and i measured how much clay i got and then i went to a wash where i could dig sand and i measured sand that way i could make sure that i had a good proportion of sand to clay i actually mixed 50 50. so the mortar here is 50 clay it's a relatively pure clay and 50 sand and then i just mixed it up in my wheelbarrow with a shovel and laid them up you can adjust the size of your kiln if you're trying to build this you can build it with a larger diameter if you want to fire more or larger pottery i didn't want to build a kiln that could fire a lot of pottery i wanted to build one where i could quickly do some test firings and so usually when i'm testing a new clay or something like that it's just something small i'm firing a small pot or maybe a test tile something like that so i didn't need something large in this case i made a circle of seven bricks laid around the base and then just started laying them up like that i dug into the ground a little bit to give it a little more stability so it's laid about one brick deep in the ground but there's no foundation of any sort it's just bricks on top of bricks laid up with mud [Music] [Music] we stand on the opposite shore so having constructed the brick shell i need to have some kind of grate in there to set the pottery on above the fire something that'll allow the heat and the gases and the smoke to come up through but that'll hold the pottery now there's ways to do this primitively using clay in this case i just want to get it done quickly in the past i've used stone sticking out to prop a grade on but that leaves you the problem of if that stone happens to crack in the fire which stone often does when it gets hot it'll crack uh then there's nothing to to brace that on anymore i've thought about building pieces of metal into laying it into the brickwork that would stick out but metal gets fatigued from use in the hot too over the heating and cooling of the metal it'll start to kind of warp and bend and it can kind of wear out from being heated a lot and so what i did was i drilled holes into the brick and then those holes allow me to insert a bolt into them i'm just going to sit it there it's not going to be threaded in or anything but if the bolts ever become worn out from heating i can always take them out and replace them so i think that's a better option and then i went down and bought this barbecue grill so i measured the diameter of my hole it's about 14 inches and so then i got a barbecue grill that is 13 inches so it fits nicely inside and then that'll sit down in there and hold the pots up i also got a heavy duty one they were different grades there were some thinner ones uh but i opted for heavier because the metal kind of loses some of its integrity from repeated heatings and so i figured a heavier duty one would last longer [Music] for all in this i stand alone show me where the ending goes honest honestly don't i should be the last show me where the ending goes i should be the last [Music] so [Music] all right let's talk for just a minute about measuring temperature in this kiln uh it's going to be very hard for me to measure the temperature in there with my infrared heat gun because when i'm shooting down in i'm going to have things in the way i'm going to have something over the top i may have shirts of pottery over the pottery to kind of hold in heat so i need to know how hot it is in there or i could just guess but i'd rather measure the temperature in there how about that so i left a hole that i can slide a thermocouple in and i use some of that corn husk that i used when i made the ladle and i just rolled that corn husk up and set it between the bricks and then laid mud around it so the idea is when i light the first fire in it that corn husk will burn away and i'll have a nice clean opening here running through the inside that i can slide my thermocouple through if the hole's not quite big enough it's just mud i can always kind of ream it out a little bit and get that thermocouple through that thermocouple probably a half inch maybe maybe a little more than a half inch in diameter but it's not very big so that should be fine [Music] to get back the life i used to [Music] know we're all in this i stand alone show me where the ending goes [Music] okay i'm sure you all have questions about the kiln so let's get into that first of all let's cover the cost what is the cost of the kiln the kiln used 107 bricks that i bought at home depot for 50 cents a piece that comes out to a cost of cents for the bricks the barbecue grill that i put inside cost as much as the bricks or nearly so the barbecue grill was 50 and the bolts to hold the grill in place were seven dollars all told that comes to a price of a hundred and ten dollars and fifty cents another relevant question is what improvements have i made over my last kiln now if you remember from that video i talked about the firebox not being large enough to get enough fuel in there to reach the temperatures i wanted so one of the things i did is i brought the firebox out from the main cylinder of the kiln that gives me more length to put longer pieces of firewood in there and hopefully i'll get more fuel and because the opening is larger more oxygen in there to the combustion chamber as well so we'll see how that works out when i do my first firing okay why use mud mortar lime based mortar standard brick mortar is lime based and lime based mortar is not going to hold up to the temperatures i'm going to get in that kiln it's going to start breaking down so the mud mortar is a better choice because it's essentially made out of the same material that the pottery i'm firing is so it's going to hold up to those high temperatures better now the mud mortar has a downsize and that is that uh it's not stabilized it it can erode from rain and moisture so uh i live in tucson i live in a very dry climate so it's probably not going to be a huge deal i may have to touch up places along the top and a few places on the sides after a year or two where it's starting to erode adobe structures here in my area have stood for hundreds of years so it's not a huge problem because fairly dry climate now if you're hoping to build one of these and you live in a moist climate you need to protect yours from moisture from two different directions one from moisture falling from the sky from rain and other precipitation maybe cover it with a tarp or something to keep that rain off of it when you're not using it but there's another source of moisture that destroys adobe and damp climates and that's moisture that wicks up from the soil so if that mud mortar is in contact with the soil and the soil is damp it will wick moisture up and begin to erode from that if you're in a moist climate and you're hoping to build one of these i would suggest you either build it up on either like a wood or a cinderblock platform up off the ground or at least maybe some concrete stem walls or something just so you're a good six inches got your mud at a good six inches or so off of that damp ground protect it from moisture from above and from below so the final question that everybody's probably asking is how does firing a kiln like this work well mine is not ready to fire yet so i will be firing in probably a week or two once all the mud inside of it has a chance to dry thoroughly so i need to give my kiln enough time for all the moisture to get out of the mortar before i fire it so in a couple of weeks i will fire it and i'll record another video showing the firing of that kiln in the meantime you can watch the video i made of the firing of my last kiln to get an idea how it works pretty much the same idea if you enjoyed this video and you got something out of it do me a favor and smash that like button if you'd like to learn more about firing a primitive convection kiln check out this video over here which is going to show that process thanks for watching i'll catch you next time [Music] you

Channel: Andy Ward's Ancient Pottery

Views: 31,044

Rating: 4.9703903 out of 5

Keywords: pottery, clay, how to, DIY, craft, primitive pottery, ancient pottery, traditional pottery, making pottery, make pottery, primitive skills, andy ward, ceramics, ceramic arts, handmade, handbuilt, handcrafted, maker, creative, DIY kiln, homemade kiln, kiln, pottery kiln, primitive kiln, convection kiln, brick kiln

Id: t692w4byVrw

Length: 12min 5sec (725 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 03 2021