All fired up, excuse the pun :), by attending the Australian Woodfire Survey 2005 exhibition  in Canberra, we decided to build our first wood fired kiln together with fellow student Geoff on a property owned by some friends of his, near Wiseman's ferry, just north of the Hawkesbury river.

 The plans for the kiln came from the SideStoke web site, an excellent site,  dedicated to Australian wood fired pottery and potters.

Click here to view them.

This is Andy laying the first row of bricks which will become part of the wall of the ash pit.

We're getting there !

This is me consulting the plans after adding the last course to the wall of the firing chamber.

And, in a couple of hours.........

finished!

Geoff And Andy standing back to admire the  results of our hard work.

The kiln differed from the original plan in that we used a piece of old pipe  that was lying about, to extend the  chimney but note that, at this stage ,we are using bricks as firebars, as in the original plan but covering them with an old grate which was also lying around.
Removing the 'door' at the side in order to load the pots.

You can see some of the pots sitting on the top of the kiln.

First firing!

Smoke is  coming out of the chimney so that's a good sign.

Note that, although no mortar was used in building this kiln, we did plug any gaps in the chamber with clay prior to firing.

After firing for a short time, we made one change to the original plan, and removed the bricks acting as firebars leaving just the grate. This considerably increased the size of the firebox and made stoking much  easier.
Firing into the night was truly spectacular. At one point we had  four foot red flames shooting from the chimney.

The kiln next morning after unpacking ready for reuse.

One slight mishap, the heat had been too much for the old pipe and, shortly after this, it spontaneously self destructed when touched so we'll need to bring a few more bricks down with us next time and rebuild it properly!

Many thanks to Jacqui and Profth of  The Grove for making this possible.

 

 
Our little kiln design lives on.

This version was built by Andrew Deem a student at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Washington, USA