Customer Reviews

Building Your Own Kiln: Three Japanese Potters Give Advice and Instructions

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Illustrated with black-and-white as well as color photographs, Building Your Own Kiln: Three Japanese Potters Give Advice And Instructions is a meticulous, step-by-step guide covering everything from choosing the right materials and tools to measuring and construction, safety concerns, and properly operating the kiln once it is built. The collaborative effort of Japanese master potters Hiromi Itabashi, Roppo Tamura, and Naoki Kawabuchi, Building Your Own Kiln is an excellent and "user friendly" guide for pottery hobbyists and seasoned practitioners seeking to take their involvement in their craft to a professional level of quality.

My property is dotted with firing pits, raku kilns and various "seat of the pants" fiber and fire brick kilns. I decided to follow the excellent instructions for Hiromi Itabashi's small gas kiln. I have purchased all the material exactly as specified but one; The "stacking shelves". He has specific dimensions of 13"x17.7", and in the photo they look more like refractory board than a kiln shelf. I have been unable to locate any kind of kiln shelf in these dimensions. I wonder if they are specific to Japan. It looks to me like these specific dimensions are necessary to proper heat distribution. In any case this makes the kiln he presents useless.
Bob

This book is a great reference to not only build several types of kilns but also to help you decide which one you want to build. Easy to follow and well illustrated for ease of use. The only negative and it is very minor is that some of the black and white photos are a little washed out but this in no way affects the ability for one to understand what they need to do.

I have always wanted to take complete responsibility for my work, and constructing a kiln to fire myself seemed like a logical next step. The small kiln described was easy enough to build, and that experience alone was helpful. Most valuable lesson was manually monitoring a firing cycle, if I had just been able to flip a switch and walk away, I would have learned nothing.
There are some pitfalls to using slotted metal as the frame for the kiln, as squaring the structure becomes difficult if your holes don't line up perfectly. Better material would be straight iron stock with welded square stock that threaded rod could be passed through for a really tight fit.
The major criticism I have is the lack of information provided on firing, so this is not for potters unfamiliar with gas firing theory. The burner described is generic, and the use of only a pyrometer to determine whether temperature has been reached is ill advised. The plans do not allow for peep holes, and no measure of heat work without cones has you guessing at the end of the firing. Highly recommend running a load of test pots, not stacked too tightly, with cone packs in front, back and middle to determine where temperature variances are.
Pictures of stack show shelves tight up against sides and burner/flue end, and this does not provide a lot of heat distribution, so I'm still working on shelf size variations to see if I can get to Cone 9/10 in 5 hours. Would not reccomend placing a shelf directly on the bricks as shown. There is room for posts in the design, placing shelf directly on brick cracked the shelf at high temp on the second firing.