On reading Daniel Rhodes and finding the builders already got it right.

I have been reading Kilns: Design, Construction, and Operations by Daniel Rhodes, a chapter at a time, and I went in, half expecting to find the places where my kiln was built wrong. What I found was closer to the opposite. Most of what the book taught me was already sitting in the bricks, put there by the two people who built her. Ana is all hard, dense firebrick. No soft brick anywhere, which was a deliberate choice by the potters who built her. Rhodes finally gave me the number behind what that means. Compared to soft insulating brick, hard firebrick stores and loses somewhere around five times as much heat. That is why Ana takes twenty-six to twenty-eight hours to fire when a lighter kiln of her kind would do it in eighteen. That slowness comes straight from the brick. She is a thermal flywheel, slow to heat and slow to let go.

The same mass that costs me all that fuel is the thing that steadies the fire, holds the soak when I step away, and protects the brick from the thermal shock that would crack a lighter wall over years of firing. It also gives a long, slow cool, and for wood ash, a slow cool is where a good deal of the surface actually happens. The cost and the benefit are not two different things. They are the same brick, looked at from two sides. Rhodes spends the better part of forty pages making the case for soft insulating brick, and then, almost in passing, he admits that hard firebrick will outlast it many times over. He was not wrong to make that case. He was writing a general book for every kind of kiln, and he said so on the page. Where his advice did not fit Ana, it was almost never a correction. It was translation, his general numbers into her specific build. The one place his book had genuinely aged out was the asbestos in his wall drawings, and that is a safety fix the world learned after he wrote, not a technique somebody improved on.

Old is not the same as outdated. The people who wrote these old books are the source that the newer books still cite, and the newer authors mostly add their own firings on top of that same foundation. When I read the standard reference and found it agreeing with Matt and Nan at nearly every turn, that was not calling anyone out. It was proof the kiln was built by people who knew exactly what they were doing, and that rebuilding her slowly and correctly is the right way to honor it. Read the old books as a student, not an auditor. Keep the technique, check the specifics against your own kiln, and only raise a flag when something has truly aged out.

If I were living yesterday a second time: I would have marked and photographed where every straight brick sits in the arch ring before I ever took the dry stack apart.

Things I am grateful for: The worn copy of Rhodes’ Kilns: Design, Construction, and Operation,  that has been following me around the house.

If I get to live to be 86, I might only have: 12626 days left.

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