Initial Pit Firing
June 15, 2025
In the past I’ve been doing my pit firings at Washington Heights Art Center (WHAC) and gotten good results, but both because that’s getting expensive and to have greater control I started doing the firings on my own. Since I live in an apartment I obviously couldn’t do these on my balcony (or at least not without very good renters insurance), so I opted for my brother’s backyard. And since I doubt he’d be very happy about me digging a big hole in his yard, my first task was to find an oil drum to convert. One of my friends from the studio was able to come through for me on this front and she gave me a used (not even rusty) one that just needed an initial fire to cook off some residuals. I spent a while trying to find free firewood around town but eventually opted to just buy some from a wholesaler who also gave me a trash bag full of sawdust no charge (pays to just ask!) I wasn’t sure how much wood I would need for the firing but I figured since a 55 gallon drum is 7.31 cubic feet and pots take up volume as well I bought six bundles at one cubic foot per half pine and half hardwood mix. Mat’s acquired and heat wave in place in town I was ready for the initial firing.
I’d seen a youtube video on converting a barrel into kiln form which is essentially just drilling some holes in the bottom and on the sides at various levels to increase airflow to the fire as well as placing a metal grate on some risers to again increase air flow so I did those. In hindsight the grate gets entirely covered in sawdust so I don’t feel it really does anything; additionally, I feel it acts as a red herring as the pots need to be placed directly in the sawdust and the grate implies the pieces can go on that above the sawdust, relevant for the second firing.
As far as arrangement of the barrel, I filled the bottom of the barrel with sawdust, maybe about 3”, followed by the grate, and then another ~3” of sawdust. I had seven pieces ready to go for this firing: five I liked, one I wanted to refire, and one shitter to test with. The five I placed directly in the sawdust leaning outwards from the center of the barrel towards the edge, and the other two I wrapped in foil saggars, the one being refired in the center of the ring and the other on the outside beneath one of the other pieces. On top of this I stacked a layer of hardwood and a layer of pine on top of this, using about two cubic feet of wood.
For colorants I used miracle grow, egg shells, copper carbonate, and one single coffee ground cake I grabbed out of my brother’s trash can. The miracle grow, coffee, and egg shells were directly in with the sawdust, and the copper carb I sprinkled liberally on the pieces. Additionally I placed all of these in both foil saggars with my test pieces. The copper carb yielded good reds on the pieces and you can track where it was placed on the pieces after the firing. The other colorants didn’t seem to be as effective in the initial firing and the only piece that did receive any amount of orange was my refire piece, which may have been left over from the previous firing. My other saggar test piece may have been able to get colors but it was in a colder part of the fire and may not have been hot enough anyway so it came out with no colors. The foil wasn’t degraded in any way which occurs at 1050ºF.
The fire took about two hours to burn down to embers but I left the pieces in until the next morning until I could remove them. My key changes I wanted after the first firing was that I kept trying to cover the barrel as this is what we’d done at WHAC for their firings, but the pit there has piping through the bottom to provide airflow in the sawdust whereas mine does not so this lead to pretty heavy reduction when even partially covered for a minute. You can see some of the results of this in how heavily greyed the pieces are instead of leaving white patches. The second change was a lack of color variety. Only the reds from the copper carb came through so I introduced both a salt and more of a potassium source for the second go. But overall I thought quite good results from my first attempt.
Total costs, about $15 worth of firewood, maybe $3 worth of copper carb, and a couple cents worth of tin foil and miracle grow for approx $19 compared to what would’ve been about $70 at WHAC.
A human being is one cubic meter, and we only take up 1.5 cubic meters. We have room for whole nother two thirds of a person
Second Firing
June 27, 2025
The second firing I had a much denser pack as I was rushing to get prepped for a last minute market entry. That coupled with a few of the pieces being on the larger side and a diagram I’d seen of pieces being tumble stacked for a barrel firing led me to try stacking more pieces into this firing. I don’t have any pictures of the stack from that firing but I had the meiping and some of the bottles standing vertically on the grate (not in the sawdust) with some of the smaller pieces on the sides in the sawdust. For colorants I wrapped a couple pieces in copper mesh, continued with the copper carb and miracle grow use, and also introduced liberal amounts of coarse table salt and dried banana peels scattered throughout. I scattered both in the saw dust and tried to place them on top of pieces where I was able too.
Results this time around were much more varied than the first one. I had a couple heaters come out that were both lying directly in the sawdust and in the hotter part of the fire. But some of the larger pieces lacking either had essentially only smoke colors. I’d attribute this to lacking contact with the sawdust at the bottom and also to having poorly stacked the wood on top so one half the barrel remained significantly colder than the other. I did however only use pine wood for this firing, as I was wanting to collect the ashes for a glaze experiment, so the fire was over much faster and I pulled the pots out within two hours at the cost of only a melted glove mark on one piece. For the pieces with poor results I would have preferred to have rebisqued and cleared the smoke out but I needed them within two days so I just reloaded the kiln and fired them up that same night.
This second firing was a bit desperate as I was low on newspaper and out of softwood. The fire itself went out three or four times and I spent maybe an hour to hour and a half desperately shovelling scrap trash branches from my brother’s yard in order to get the hardwood logs to catch on their own. Bear in mind it was 10pm at this point and I’d already spent the last four hours next to this hot ass barrel in the 90º Denver heat. It’s a little known fact that the hotter the day the better the results so I think if I’d waited for a 95º I wouldn’t have needed the second attempt, but my effort seemed to have paid off as I got better, although still just okay, results with the second attempt. Colorants were identical to the earlier one except a few banana peels since I was running out and maybe some additional sweat coming off my forehead. I took absolutely no photos of the second attempt afterwards and just went to get a burger afterwards.
