The local pottery supply store, Aardvark, does not sell the clay bodies that I was using in San Jose, CA. So I'm trying the ones that they do sell. The local potters recommended "Bee Mix".
The pots shown were thrown using Bee Mix. The smallest pot is dry. I used 1/8th of a bag. The clay is soft - no grog that you can feel. Even though it is soft, it holds its shape well.
I used 1/4th of a bag to throw the pot on the left. The pot in the rear used 1/2 of a bag. The remaining 1/8th of the bag was used to create some test tiles for testing the glazes I have on this clay body.
I tried to throw a pot using a whole bag but was not successful. I added too much water and it sagged when it was a few inches taller than the 1/2-bag pot. I tried to save the resulting pot but when it was drying it cracked. The pot was not of uniform thickness so the thinner parts dried quicker than the thick parts resulting in too much stress so it cracked. Oh well, that's part of the process of learning how to use a new clay body.
Bisque Firing
On May 10, 2010 these pots were bisque fired (1828 degrees F) along with many other pots.
The tall vase did not survive the bisque firing. It developed a crack slightly above its fattest point
The other pots were fine. In particular I like the platters. They are 13.5 and 12.5 inches in diameter, respectively.
I'll update this blog entry after the glaze firings to show the final products.
Setting up the CoffeePottery studio has taken longer than expected. Yesterday the final step was done -- the gas line for the Geil kiln was connected. I wasn't there to see it, I was in Sunnyvale doing some training of the new engineers who will be taking over the Yahoo! Small Business development. My wife was there to help the Southwest Gas company meter installer - but I'm getting ahead of myself. This is the full story.
We bought the Henderson, NV property in December of 2005. We picked it for two major reasons -- a great, unobstructed view of the mountains (see the Sunset pictures on the this web site) and the lot was large enough to add a pottery studio casita (means "small house").
We had the place, so the next step was to build the pottery studio. Before we could build it we needed to design it. Before we could design it we needed to figure out what was needed to house a kiln. I looked around at kiln manufacturers and found Geil Kilns. One of the major proponents of these kilns, Tom Coleman, lived in the Las Vegas area. I chose the DL-18F model. It has 18 cubic feet of space inside the kiln for pots so I could throw pots that are 40 inches high and still fire them. (I've never thrown any pot more than 15 inches high yet so this kiln was big enough to not be limiting factor.)
Having chosen the kiln I now knew that the kiln room in the pottery studio needed to be about 11 feet x 11 feet. We wanted the casita to potentially be a separate living unit after it had served its purpose as a pottery studio so we designed it with
- a kiln room that could be a golf-cart garage
- a display/entry room that could be a living room/kitchen
- a work room that could be a bed room
- a glaze room that could be a closet
- and a full bathroom
Now that we knew what we wanted to build we looked for a contractor. We picked a contractor in June of 2006 and they said the project should take a few months. My wife moved to Henderson to oversee the work. (We still had our house in San Jose.) In August of 2006 the foundation for the casita was poured.
This shows them pouring the floor to the kiln room:
By September 5, 2006 the casita was taking shape:
...but by November 22 the progress was slowing down:
At this point the builder needed the kiln chimney and hood so I ordered those parts. By March, 2007, the stucco had been applied and the kiln chimney was in place.
Unfortunately, when the kiln hood arrived it was damaged:
We had to get a local contractor to fix it. The hood was not actually needed until the kiln was in place so this did not really affect the schedule of the casita completion. By April 2, 2007, they were painting the stucco.
By May 23, 2007, the drywall had been done.
And finally, on June 15, 2007, about a year after the casita project was started, the kiln room was ready to accept the kiln.
We had to rent a forklift to handle the kiln when it arrived that day. Fortunately, the truck driver that delivered the kiln operated the forklift.
The truck driver inserted the kiln through the double doors without breaking anything. We had also rented a pallet jack to move the kiln once it was in the room. We placed it in the center of the room. The kiln room has 2 sets of double doors, one facing the driveway and the other facing the courtyard. These pictures show the kiln from those 2 perspectives:
It looked like we were close to our goal but looks are deceiving.
While the casita was being built we were re-decorating our house. When we purchased the house all the floors except the kitchen had wall-to-wall baby blue carpet (even the bathrooms). We started replacing it. We had installed wood flooring in the living room when we made a discovery. When we rolled the carpet back on the next section we found a large crack in the foundation (slab). It was half an inch wide at one point and the slab was not level across the gap -- there was at least a quarter inch vertical displacement. The home was not 10 years old yet so the builder's warranty was still in force. We contacted the builder, Pulte Homes, and they sent investigators. They decided the only way to fix it was to move us out of our home while they replaced the broken slab.
Pulte asked us to move out at the beginning of July and told us it would be done before the end of September. We were a bit skeptical of the time line since the casita contractor did not give us a good time estimate but we were pleasantly surprised. Pulte did what they said they would do. We are very happy with their work.
Since Pulte was going to have a construction crew on site starting July 5, 2007, we told the casita contractor they had to be done by then. We didn't want two different construction crews working on our property at the same time. If anything went wrong one could blame the other. Therefore they rushed to finish the casita. The inspectors signed off on June 26, 2007.
Unfortunately, they failed to sign off on the gas line from the gas meter to the kiln room so it was left up to me to get the inspection done. I was still working full time for Yahoo! so finding a day to go down to city hall was a problem. I finally did that on March 1, 2010 -- the first Monday after retiring from Yahoo!
After passing inspection I hired a plumber to connect the gas pipe from the wall to the kiln then we called the gas company to install a larger gas meter. The new meter was installed on March 18, 2010. My wife, again, supervised since I was at Yahoo! in Sunnyvale, CA. The day after arriving back home I loaded the kiln with the pots I had made the past three years.
The first bisque firing was done on March 20, 2010.
