More Trouble…

…hopefully a good kind.

I decided to keep using the mini melt rings for doing pot melts for now until I can get the right furniture for melting directly into casting rings.  My last attempt didn’t work out so well.  In order to keep using terra cotta saucers I really need something like this.

I found this at Delphi Glass. The problem here is that it’s designed for their pot melt system so it’s only 7 inches wide and from what I can tell the hole itself is no more than 5 inches in diameter.  In order to take advantage of the 8 inch saucers I really need something that’s 10 inches wide with a 6 to 6.5 inch hole.  I’m fairly sure I wont be able to buy something that ready made so I’ll have to make one myself out of a kiln shelf.  In theory that shouldn’t be to hard if you have the right equipment to cut a hole.  There’s one catch; I don’t have the right equipment. 

So in the meantime I’ll stick with using the mini melt casting rings.  The main disadvantage to that is I’m introducing and extra step in the process.  I have to take the blank and do and extended full fuse at 1500 for about 45 minutes to flatten it out.  But this isn’t really what this post is about.

I was looking at my 8 inch ring and thinking “I can probably squeeze 2 of them in my kiln and maybe even a 6 inch melt as well”.  I had been doing my melts on a kiln washed shelf set directly on the bottom of the kiln.  I decided lose the shelf and line the bottom of My 16 X 16 inch kiln with a 17 X 17 inch piece of 3 millimeter fiber paper. 

Here’s two 8 inch melts in situ (I’ve been dying to use that somewhere…Crappy Diem!)

Here are the results:

For the next batch I did 3.  If it weren’t for the thermocouple I could squeeze in another 6 incher.

While being able to crank out a bunch of melts out a small kiln is pretty cool there’s a downside to this.  I have further processing to do on these blanks and I can really only do one at a time especially if I’m flattening them out.  Hmmm…maybe I just need a bigger kiln…Muah Ha Ha ha ha.

Yup.  This is trouble.