Ware Not Air

First bisque!
Although I thought I had a crazy amount of greenware, I managed to fit all of the bone-dry pieces into the kiln. I have more capacity than I thought, so hooray for that. I just kept squeezing it in, because it takes almost the same amountof propane to heat ware as air. A couple of notes:

• The door blocks fired without incident, much to my great relief. 
• They shrunk about an inch, out of a starting length of 17.5 inches. So that makes the shrinkage rate of this castable recipe about 5.5 %. Not too bad, but more than I had counted on; so now I am going to have solve a gappage problem, by cutting or casting bricks to fit. (I could just print the recipe, but there is some silliness on the Goshen College page about all-rights-reserved, blah-blah-blah. I think it unlikely that they would even know about it if I did publish it, and quite laughable that they would try to protect a castable recipe -- for what? -- but I'll respect their preference, while snickering at the pretension.)
• Um, just, YAY! I'm firing a kiln! For the first time in months! I finally get to see how this heat-box performs.
• I am hoping for first glaze next weekend, but that's a mad lot of glazing in a short time, so...hmm, maybe Thanksgiving weekend?

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