Wood usage calculation below.
I finished this morning, Monday the 6th. at about 5:00 am. My goal was to do a firing that tested the things I have read about how Abe Anjin fires. Fire, rest, fire, rest, etc. I now understand he doesn’t do that schedule for the same reasons I am interested in it. I was able to do the fire-rest schedule up to the last day. I started at about 3:45 am on Sunday and by 7:00 pm I was just starting to get glaze melt. Because of that I decided to go through to the end. I think in firing alone it is not possible to do all the work that is necessary for 25-26 hours and make the critical decisions that are necessary. In a strict ‘fire alone’ model I would have shut things down and restarted the firing today. I would have lost about 10 hours of heat work but I would have been able to stick with the model. As it was I called in reinforcements, my wife, for about 3 hours while I dozed between stokes.
I personally still can’t say if the fire/rest schedule, aka Abe Anjin style, will work on my kiln as I used a burner. I used what I will call a fire the kiln and then put a burner in the front while I rest schedule and as soon as I open the kiln I will show results. I am not interested in natural fly-ash so results will be more about melt and look.
Wood Usage.
I used much less wood. I usually judge wood usage by how I stack it. I call a single stack a ‘rack’. I have 8 racks around the kiln. For those who want a more quantifiable measurement the size of the racks are as follows. All wood is cut and split to a length of about 50 cm.
Three 5 meter long racks. Two of these are stacked to a height of about 160 cm., one is to about 100 cm.
Fours racks that are 2.5 meters long, stacked to about 180 cm.
So I have about 39 linear meters of wood if it was stacked about 100 cm. high. Using this site, http://www.maine.gov/ag/firewood.html it comes out to about 5.3 cords of wood.
I usually use the whole pile or close to it. This time I used up about 31.5 linear meters of wood at 100 cm. tall, 4.3 cords, about 20% less.
My kiln measures as follows.
Two rooms. Each room is roughly 150 cm. deep, 180 cm. wide, 100 cm. tall excluding a very low arch. Roughly 5.4 cubic meters.
A fire box, roughly 180 cm. deep, 200 cm. wide, 50 cm. tall. Roughly 1.8 cubic meters.
I have much more wood stacked around my other kiln, about 30 meters of wood stacked about 200 cm. high, more than 8 cords in reserve. I don’t include that wood in this because I would only start moving it in the case something went really wrong and I had to use it.
Nanban ceramics 