The next step was cleaning out the garage and figuring out where the kiln should go - after some trial and error we came up with a decent preliminary setup:
There are still lots of improvements we'd like to make - for one, the work surface is not entirely level - but for the moment we decided to work with this for a while to see where the pain points are before throwing more money at it.
We pre-fired the kiln overnight, which led to a small scare - in the morning, the controller displayed an error message. We figured out what had gone wrong fairly fast though - the final stage in the schedule specified a target temperature of 80 degrees, too close to the room temperature of 76 degrees, which confused the controller. To avoid that failure, I now always specify an ending temperature of 90 - 100 degrees.
Next came the first trial run. We primed and dried the kiln shelf, and spent a happy afternoon assembling a variety of small fusing projects:
Programming the kiln is relatively easy, but we were happy that we went to the How to Program Your Kiln session at Bullseye, which saved us a lot of nerves and tedious manual reading. We used the sample fusing schedule from the class, and a looooong night later this was the result:
Overall, we were pleased with the first experiment, and quite ready to do another!
