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Full video transcript:
This is a small reconditioned kiln. It used to be an electric kiln. I now have a gas burner pumping gas into the kiln. So we load the pots in there and we are firing to a little over 1000 degrees centigrade. When we get to that temperature we lift the lid like I just did and then we take the pots out with these tongs while I’m dressed in long gloves… flame proof hat… Take the pots out and put them into this which basically is a metal box filled with sawdust at the time. A little word on the Raku glazing… To begin with everything has a melting point and what we’re doing is building glazes that will become liquid. Think of glaze as a glass – it is a glass – we’re building a glaze that will melt at 1000 degrees and the idea of taking them out of the kiln at that temperature, and putting them into the sawdust or even dumping them in a bucket of water allows us to “freeze” the glaze. So once it has become molten in this kiln, we are then cooling it very fast. Water obviously works the fastest. If we put it in sawdust and cover it down, the sawdust catches fire. And the pot is covered in sawdust and it burns slowly in there because it sets fire to the sawdust – 1000 degrees will set fire to most everything… So there’s a reason for doing that. That is to create an environment in there where the fire is starving of oxygen. Fire needs oxygen to burn. This is called a “reduction firing” – we are reducing the “O” in the chemistry. So let’s take copper for example – copper is a green colour. They use it in dyes, they use it in paints, they use it in all kinds of things to make them green but if you take a lot of the oxygen out of the chemistry it becomes red. Which is quite a miracle. I don’t fully understand the chemistry of that. But… if we glaze a pot with copper and we put it in there we are looking for a red finish. And it’s elusive… the interesting thing about Raku is it is not 100 percent predictable. You get funny results. The quality of the sawdust apparently makes a difference, um, bamboo leaves will do a different thing than cedar wood shavings. And that is the fun of the whole thing. And the process of heating them up in there and putting them in there until they’re cool… is about 2.5 hours. Which is really very fast in terms of firing ceramics. So it’s almost instantaenous. And what is nice is that the people who are making the pots and then glazing them, get to see the finished result almost immediately. So it’s good fun! And um… There’s a lot of heat. And a lot of smoke. A lot of fire. We put on propper glasses (PPE) to do that because if one of those pots explodes for any reason you don’t want bits and pieces of 1000 degress flying about! But that has never happened to us and we try not to let it happen. So that is the process basically. And we’re looking forward to doing that next week and having some fun. Good?!