Kiln Day

November 15, 2010 1:22 am Sir Haxington Seattle

Kiln Day is always good.

My friend and co-worker Josh has a home made brick kiln in his backyard. He also has really cool neighbors and no HOA to worry about, which means we get to engage in some high heat and great experimentation. 1200 degree temperatures from a wood fire, here we come.

We’ve melted in the past, so today was pretty casual. We arrived around 1 pm to find Kevin, another co-worker and Josh about 90% of the way done clearing a pallet of bricks and rebuilding the chimney on the kiln. Josh had reconfigured the kiln a few months ago and here they were putting on the final touches.

Josh had a nice mix of dry pine and alder that was begging to be split into kindling. I’m no stranger to an axe, and I began swinging as we talked about the plans for the day.

Splitting wood is great for the mind and body. Once you get going, it’s difficult to stop. Even if your body tires, you want to continue since you’re always seeing progress. Large pieces split into two. Their children split into two more. Those usually get split one more time. Throw all the pieces into the pile. Repeat. I think it’s my form of mediation.

Kevin wanted to give it a go as he’d never split wood in his life. Josh, worried about his safety was sure to tell him to keep his legs spread apart. If a piece of wood goes rouge and flies off, it needs to go through your legs and not break a knee cap. I use a slightly different technique (one leg forward, the other behind, stand a bit to the side), but hey, not a bad rule for first timers.

He turned out to be a natural. Well, a few mis-swings, but a little more correction from Josh (aim in front of center, you over extend on the down swing) and he was off and running.

Kevin split a few more pieces as the kiln fire raged on. Lots of smoke was coming from the kiln, especially from the chimney which wasn’t a good thing. The interior of the kiln is supposed to have a certain air flow from one end to the other, with a “clean burn” coming from the chimney, which wasn’t happening. This worried Josh. Kevin and Josh started debugging. I went back to chopping.

“Wet bricks? Maybe it’s because the bricks are wet. It could be just steam and not smoke?”

“Could be air flow. It worked last time… the only difference is the chimney…”

I noticed they were using a cast iron frying pan to cover the chimney hole that had some open areas around the edges. In previous designs, the system was all closed up. I have no clue about how it’s supposed to work, but if you’re designing a closed system, there’s the obvious flaw. I suggested pulling a few more bricks from the pallet and using them to close the hole, which seemed to do the trick. As Josh continued to add wood to the fire, the chimney burned more and more clean.

As is customary on Kiln Day, alcohol must be consumed. And cigars. I brought over some port from a local winery. Josh had some port of his own, bottled in 1983. I knew my port wouldn’t be as good, but I declared we have a “port-off” blind taste test. Time to take a break from busting up dead trees.

The local port was fruity, had the aftertaste of your average red table wine, but was really sweet. The color was a deep reddish-purple. 18% alcohol by volume.

The 1983 port was… divine.  Smooth going down, great aftertaste, deep and complex overall flavor. The perfect amount of sweetness. Rich amber color. 20% alcohol by volume.

No contest. KO in the first round. The winner was clear. 1983 was a great year.

Then came the tobacco. Cigars. I’m not much of a cigar smoker, but if someone is offering, I’m down. Josh wanted to know which one I wanted. I didn’t really know or care. Cigar me please!

Kevin had to get going, so we said our goodbyes. He had to head to Ballard, which meant he was about to travel through an inter-dimensional portal. Ballard is notoriously far from everything in Seattle, even though it’s technically downtown. Ballard is a great place with many great restaurants, but I try to avoid it at all costs. Most East-siders do.

With two varieties of port coursing through my veins and rolling on a nicotine high, I went back to chopping. I was determined to chop all the wood he had out at the moment. Wood that had been there for months, remaining intact, mocking me.

I must have chopped for another hour or two while chomping down on my stogie. I’d take breaks every so often for port and was definitely feeling good and buzzed. You’d think the combination of wine and axes would be a liability. If anything, it kept me more focused and loose.

At one point, we started hearing bag pipes. Were we imagining it? Nope. We looked over the fence to see a man in a kilt jamming on some very real bagpipes in a church parking lot. This went on for about 10 minutes. Somewhat surreal, but that’s Seattle for you. Good chopping music.

Josh continued building up the coals in the kiln, putting the wood to good use. We talked about life, work, the usual. At this point, I realized I hadn’t really thought about our end goal with the kiln. I was under the assumption we were just doing a rebuild of the kiln and chopping wood. Josh informed me that we’d in fact be melting today. Melting aluminum.

We put the port away and moved on to some sparkling wine.

With the entire wood pile chopped and stacked, we were ready for some serious heat. Josh’s neighbor had given Josh a hefty bag of aluminum shavings to experiment with. We scooped a bunch into the ceramic crucible and placed them into the kiln. Time to try melting something.

More drinking, talking, waiting. Patience.

Failure. The aluminum shavings were glowing red hot but they didn’t melt. We were hitting the right temperatures, just shy of 1200. We theorized what could be wrong. I remember looking up alloy compositions online not too long ago and thought about how not alloys are the same. Josh mentioned this was airplane grade aluminum. Probably a higher melting point. Maybe one we couldn’t reach.

Luckily, we had melted aluminum before. Most hardware stores sell aluminum flashing that would definitely work. We had some left over from a previous Kiln Day, so I rolled some up and put it in the crucible. We would melt something today.

Josh had a few other test subjects going, including some glass and marbles he was melting in a few other ceramic containers. They began to lose their original shape.

More drinking, talking, waiting. Patience.

Success. The flashing had melted. But now what? Probably due to the copious amount of port we had consumed in addition to the sparkling wine, we really hadn’t put much thought into what we’d do with our melted prize.

“Ingots. Lets make ingots and re-melt them again later!”

Ingots are always good. You lose the slag from the surface and can extract the pure, clean aluminum for future projects. Josh laid down the old biscuit tray we had picked up at an estate sale a while back, poured in the shiny liquid aluminum, then dumped the slag onto the cement. As the aluminum cooled and hardened, it began to glow a bright red. Josh picked up the pan and laughed as he showed me the bottom of the pan, which was also glowing a bright red where the ingots had been poured.

As I told him to be careful, one of the red hot ingots came flying out and nearly hit him in the crotch. We laughed.

This went on for a few more hours. Roll up more flashing, place it in the crucible, let it melt, pour it off, repeat. We tried putting some of the shavings in with the melted flashing, but it seemed to weaken the composition of the ingot.

Eventually, I had a hankering for chopping wood again. Josh offered me another cigar which I gladly accepted. I went back to business when Josh thought he heard his neighbor outside. Josh wanted to ask him about the aluminum shavings he gave us.

He disappeared while I continued to chop. After a few minutes, Josh returned with Bill, his next door neighbor.

We greeted each other. Bill is a tall, bearded craftsman and engineer who recovers old airplanes. An interesting and excited fellow, he and Josh immediately went to assessing the air flow in the kiln. Bill was convinced he needed more draw coming from the chimney to pull air through faster. He offered to build him “one of those chef hats” you typically see on the chimneys of restaurants. He also pointed out the angle from the fire to the port was too steep. 90 degrees. The hot air was slamming into the wall and losing it’s momentum and cooling off. With a few adjustments, Josh could hit much high temperatures. Bill also suggested injecting other types of gasses into the kiln like pure oxygen and even nitrous oxide from whipped cream canisters. Too far above our pay-grade.

The topic of shavings came up. Bill confirmed our suspicions. The grade of alloy had a different makeup and had a higher melting point. Sad.

I went back to chopping as they continued to mentally reengineer the kiln. Bill asked where I was from, and I told him about the small town where I grew up in Oregon.

“Yeah, I stayed there once. Shit hole down. I stayed there at the Indian casino. $200 bucks and they treated me like a king!”

We traded a few more stories and Bill talked about how the Italians were notoriously lazy engineers when it came to metric to English measurement conversations. He wished everything was metric because it’d save him money and time. He talked about some planes he recently recovered from South America. He talked about some systems he built to control oil spills that were built into airplanes. He talked about how he wished the economy would turn around, and how he hated dealing with the bureaucracy of large companies. He talked about how his wife, who was a huge Frontierville nut would be pissed that he came over for too long and he should get back soon.

That was, until we started talking about audio equipment. Turned out, he was a mega audiophile. He told us about how much money he put into his stereo system, which is close to what I make in a year.

My thoughts just flashed back to five minutes ago when he said he wished the economy would turn around, but here he was putting tens of thousands of dollars into his personal stereo.

He went on about speaker wire, how copper was the best metal for audio cables, how he loves analogue, how he can definitely tell the difference between MP3 and pretty much anything else.

He also told us a rather sad story about a local celebrity who had recently died. Bill was friends with the celebrity’s son and how they had grown up together. The problem was that the son of the celebrity found about his fathers death through Bill. Yikes. Not the best way to find out but at least he heard about it from a friend.

Josh handed him one of the ingots we poured that had a mix of the aluminum shavings and some flashing. Bill wanted to take it to his shop an analyze it, learn more about alloys from his “Kaiser Book,” and see if he could generally help our cause. He took off, ingot in hand, and wished us good luck.

Kiln time was winding down and dinner time was drawing near. We purchased a set of steaks from Bill the Butcher earlier in the day. Top sirloin. Tasty, locally butchered beef.

Josh closed up the kiln and we brought all the important equipment inside. Josh fired up the stove and prepared the pan. He began chopping garlic and got the rosemary ready. Into the pan went the meat and the spices and eventually some green beans.

Dinner was one of the better ones I could remember recently. Green beans had a perfect crunch to them and the steaks were medium. French bread on the side, ripped into chunks by hand. We drank Vouve Clicquot Brut out of mason jars while eating our well balanced and delicious meal. We talked about how Bill was a pretty cool guy and neighbor to have.

We traded more stories. Josh showed me the new gun he recently purchased. He made some tea with his fancy automated tea making machine which we drank after dinner.

The evening wound down. Time to go home.

Outside, the coals in the kiln were still glowing. Kiln Day would come again.