How to prepare a Glass Kiln - everything you need to know.

hello and welcome to my studio my name is Derek and I'm a professional stained glass artist and today we're talking all about Kilns recently I asked you the creative Community to send me your questions on the topics that you wanted more information for and one of the great topics was Kilns how to use Kilns to get great painted effects so this video today is all about Kiln if you get value in today's video consider leaving a like and subscribing to the channel and if you want to support the channel you can join the channel or you can buy me a coffee two great ways of showing your continuing support so what is a kiln well basically a kiln is a box or a container that you can raise the temperature in when you put your glass into that container it raises the temperature up to its firing temperature now depending on whether you're using paints or enamels or stains they all have a slightly different firing temperature but essentially paints are brought up to a temperature of around 660 degrees Centigrade which is about 1220 degrees Fahrenheit in yellow silver stain is brought up to a slightly lower temperature of around 620 degrees Centigrade which is 1148 degrees Fahrenheit every cone is different however and it's important to realize that the Kiln that you're working with might fire your paints and might fire your stains and enamels at a slightly different temperature to the type to the temperatures that I use in my kiln so you have to experiment to a certain extent now my favorite Kiln at the moment in the Kiln that I use most often for things like teaching my students is my gas Kiln the reason I like the gaskion is because you can bring it up to temperature and it cools down relatively quickly in fact you can have a piece of painted glass put into the Kiln and back in your hand in about an hour which is really really fast if you're working with an electric kiln it's a much slower cycle the reason for that is the temperature is retained inside the body or of an electric kiln for far longer the insulation is far better there are less holes for the heat to escape I would recommend to you to try and buy a gas Kiln if you can the problem is gas Kilns aren't made anymore the one company that was making gas Kilns until relatively recently was a European company called Hof but they have now stopped making gas cans so the majority of you who are watching this video today will be using an electric kiln and I also use an electric kiln there's nothing wrong with them they're absolutely fantastic so in my studio I have two types of Kilns here the first is the electric cone and this Kiln has filaments electric filaments in the roof of the Kiln which heat up the container and the Kiln bed here is where I put the glass to be fired and you can see the bedding here is Whiting it's basically chalk calcium carbonate and that is the prefer material that I use when I'm doing all of my painted work now this is my gas Kiln it's slightly different to the electric one in so far as it has got gas burners in the roof rather than electric filaments and the great advantage of using a gas Kiln is it heats up far faster there's some glass here already in that's been fired and again it's been placed into the Whiting or the calcium carbonate and the gas Kiln is a really fast cone for turning around things really quickly where the electric kiln is much slower it takes about 24 hours to go through the cycle Whiting is basically calcium carbonate or chalk you can find suppliers of chalk usually at building Builders Merchants but I'll also Link in the description below to where I Source my Whiting from and if you go into my Amazon shop you can find suppliers who will supply waiting to you there as well so this piece of glass here is what I've been using for years to smooth out my Whiting with it's basically a piece of six mil so the preparation for the Whiting is very straightforward I'm using my glass template to agitate The Whiting like this and then I'm pulling the glass template back Across The Whiting to level it out and create a nice flat surface onto which I can introduce my painted pieces so here's a painted piece putting it into the Whiting and just gently pressing it down so that you get rid of any lumps and bumps and you get a nice flat surface for the glass the great advantage of using Whiting is it can be used time and time again um it's it's very often the case that I will work with the same Whiting for maybe two months two or three months depends how much firing I'm doing but if for example I'm firing something like enamels I always fire enamels face up because they do absorb the Whiting so here I'm putting some yellow silver stain face down into the Whiting and that will get absorbed by The Whiting over a period of time and that's when you then have to change it so this is the kind of situation that tells you you need to change your Whiting when the Whiting starts to become corrupted and you get all all kind of stains and bits and pieces in the medium I've been using this quite a lot over the last few weeks for a big project and I've done a number of firings but it gets to the point where it starts to look like this where you're getting yellow silver stain and sort of but I don't know just a whole lot of mess and crud in in the Whiting and it really is time then to change the fighting and to re-bed it with new whitening so I'll just take you through the process of what I use here now obviously it being whitening with a lot of um residue silver stain and things in there I have to wear a mask and protect myself because you don't want to be inhaling anything that might damage your lungs over the long term I don't want to be breathing in those fibers I don't want to be breathing in anything that might damage my lungs in the long term so I wear a P3 mask that is the um standard mask that's used for particulates and for things that would create dusts harmful dust so do your research and find in your country what the equivalent of a P3 mask would be in addition to a mask I'm wearing gloves as well because you don't want to get any microfibers trapped in your skin when you're cleaning the Kilns basically take as much precaution as you possibly can just to ensure you don't breathe the dust in or get any of fibers from the Kiln onto your skin I'm also using a vacuum cleaner here to get rid of all the dust it's quite a messy job there so it's something that you do have to prepare for and to try and keep the place clean so this is the bed of the electric kiln as you can see now nice and clean ready for a new layer of Whiting so I'm applying the Whiting a little bit like icing sugar on a cake so I'm building up that layer in a nice smooth layer so we're getting probably about a centimeter is worth centimeters thickness of whiting on both of the kiln's beds uh there they are already now so what we do before we can actually use them is we have to fire them once up to firing temperature it's called a blind firing no glass in here just now simply firing the whitening up to temperature and that burns out any of the impurities in the Whiting and gets the Whiting ready for use and once we've done this one firing with nothing in it we're ready to use it in subsequent firings so I like to use whiting on the bed of my kiln as the preferred method for firing my glass however there is another method and I'm just going to show you that now in order to do that we've got to go and visit a friend of mine who is another glass artist to just show you the process that she uses to fire her glass in her Kiln [Music] so we're traveling up the motorway to meet our husband and wife team who both need stained glass windows Ian runs his own Studio designing and making stained glass windows is completely is called Emmy stained glass and literally next door to Ian Studios is clear studio and she runs a Stained Glass studio designing and making new work hi hi Claire how are you doing I'm good thank you it's fantastic to be back in the studio again and I see you're busy teaching you have some students working with you here today yep absolutely Lots going on and also you have been extremely busy on this project tell me a little bit about this this is a set of Windows for scampton church up near Lincoln and it is to celebrate the 80th anniversary of the 617 squadrons formation and they were the ones that did the Dam Busters raid I don't know if the camera's picking this up but there are lots of different techniques at play here you're using fused glass I can see little diamonds here yeah some beautiful these are using infused powders to build up layers to create slightly more three-dimensional effect to get the the different shades and tones in the poppies so this goes at the top in the middle and this has got the cross of remembrance on it absolutely beautiful now I've been following you on Facebook as this Project's been developing and one of the images particularly took my attention apart from the beautiful artwork was the Kiln and the Kiln shelf and I'm making a tutorial today um on Kilns and how we Glass artists work with Kilns now I don't have a kiln shelf but you do can you tell us a little bit about how you get on with the Kiln shelf and how you use it in comparison to save instead of killing paper or using any other products well I find with the most of my work I want a very flat surface so I particularly like this very very smooth surface so I've got kind of different types of Kiln shells I've got this one's quite a large one and it's bought specially in they're quite hard to get hold of Kiln Charles this large with the smaller Kilns they tend to come with a kiln shelf I'd strongly advise if you ever buy a kiln buy the Kiln shelf that comes with it and that that they work really well and then I I backwash the Kiln shells so if I'm doing paint work it won't stick to the Kiln shelf just talk us through if you can the preparation of the Kiln shelf if it's if you're working specifically with painted glass uh well it's much easier with painted glass you don't need an awful lot you don't need to use Fiber paper at all back wash is perfectly sufficient I use this Bullseye shelf primer mix it up one part primer five parts water so big strokes and probably five layers go opposite way each time and it'll look quite pink that's then fired up to 260 degrees and that'll just get it ready for your first firing the first firing the Shelf will still look a little pink but after that it goes white like this and it's just quite chalky yeah and you can just use it repeatedly and repeatedly until it starts to deteriorate then scrub it back and start again wear a mask use a Hoover if it's if it's thicker you'd scrape it yeah first Hoover it up generally got my box of gloves that I wear all the time for everything I do now if nothing else you don't want to keep having to get dirty hands and keep washing them all the time exactly exactly yeah fantastic so I can see here also this particular Kiln has got holes all the way through so I'm taking it that it's Hollow on the inside yeah yeah I had I did have a thin just single layer Kiln shelf in there but it cracked I think it's just too thin and too big to accommodate it and the heating up and the cooling down it just couldn't cope with it because I wanted it propped up off the floor so it would cool underneath with these ones they're so much more structurally strong I've had that Kiln shelf now for I don't know 15 years probably and it's still going going strong they have to be level you don't want to wobble in it you don't want any adjustment in it any wobble can mean your shelf might crack so get it nice and flat and straight um and it just helps with the cooling so now that we've learned all about using a kiln check out this video next as you continue your journey in learning about how to use paints to get great results with your stained glass projects leave a like subscribe to the channel leave comments and suggestions for future videos and I'll see you in the next one bye for now [Music]

Channel: Derek Hunt Artist

Views: 11,863

Keywords: derek hunt, derekhuntartist, glass painting, stained glass, craft courses, stained glass artist, painting tutorial, church art, stained glass art, stained glass painting, silver stain, glass kiln firing, glass kiln shelf, kiln glass art, preparing your kiln, how to, kiln glass, fired glass

Id: BLTavGW-Zxo

Length: 13min 3sec (783 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 06 2023