To build a wood fired ceramic kiln of this type is easy. If you want to make a small-scale kiln to build and burn as a solo project or a two-man team, this is a good choice. This is a classic wood fired brick-kiln design, and also a good starter kiln. It’s an updraft brick-kiln design, found in many versions around the internet. It’s built in a variety of ways from big to small, and also given a variety of names. I call it the half S-kiln, I guess it’s as wrong as anything else.
It’s really just bricks stacked on top of each other and secured with steel wire, I consider that’s safe enough for a small kiln. It can be bricked up and fired in a day. This kiln is easily built with bricks stacked on top of each other, with no use of mortar, you can take the kiln down again as soon as the bricks cool down if you want. The schematic design is described in detail in the 3D model down below, you can twist and turn and zoom to see it from every angle.
If you are searching for books about how to build wood-fired pottery kiln, take a look here:
All the books about building pottery kilns/
I managed to fire the kiln two times before the winter & snow were coming, and now I can hardly wait for the spring to continue the work, see the progress on my new kiln here:
How to build a wood fired ceramic kiln: This design needs some special-sized bricks, something you easily fix with a hard metal saw.
When the kiln gets hot the bricks expand a little, making glitches between the bricks. The hotter it gets, the bigger the glitches will be. Remember to secure the kiln, I use steel wires. I found it to be strong enough to keep this small kiln together.
We built an opening in the back of the kiln to dig out embers blocking the air ventilation under the fire chamber. When not removing embers, keep it locked, you don’t want cool air from the back.
How to build a wood fired ceramic kiln.
What is special about this kiln is its long fire chamber, it has a lot of space for combustion. But it’s hard to see inside if it burns at its full length, or if it has openings and “cold sones” between the firewood, which potentially could be leaking cold air up in the wares chamber. It’s also hard to get wood deep into the kiln. I use a 1-meter stick to stuff wood back in there. Throwing short sticks deep into the kiln is possible, better still was firing with thin sticks as long as the fire chamber, and feeding them one by one in its full length.
Buildups of embers on the other hand are not a problem, embers fall down into the air ventilation shaft, which you need to remove from time to time.
When you start firing use an hour or two to pass the boiling temperature of water. Here I start up with some oversized fire-starters for an hour, keeping ting steady around 80 degrees. Burn slowly til you pass 150 degrees, this is called candling and is all about giving moisture time to vaporize from the clay before it reaches boiling temperature. After that I burn as fast as I can; from 150 to 1000 degrees Celsius takes about 5 hours. The Half S kiln is easy to control both in the hot and the cold end of the fire-range.
The hotter it gets, the harder it is to increase the temperature. This means the last two hundred degrees can be tuff. Stalling means the kiln won’t get hotter no matter what you try. To overcome stalling and reach your desired temperature; understanding the practical aspects of woodfires and combustion is key. Finding a good fire rate for your kiln is important.
Read in-depth about wood firing and how to reach high temperatures here:
How to burn ceramic consistently in a wood-fired kiln/
Read about clay for wood firing here:
How to make terracotta pottery for wood-fired kilns/
Yea! I reached my 1000 degrees Celsius:
See the 3D model:
Open the 3D model in fullscreen:
https://woodfireceramic.com/vv-content/kilns-horizontal-stack-bricks.html
How to build a wood fired ceramic kiln: I find this to be a great kiln, but also a bit ineffective; with too much fireplace going on and too little space for the ceramics. I call it the half S kiln because of it’s design, and want to redesign it to a “full S-kiln”. It should make it more effective in my mind, but more about that another time.
This website was my first inspiration:
https://sidestoke.com/firstkilns/firstkilns.html
But there are many web pages of similar kilns:
http://www.lafayetteclayworks.com/opt-events/Backfire%20kiln.html
https://www.ginabaumart.com/news-1
https://opopots.blogspot.com/2009/03/my-woodfired-kilns-all-7.html