So my firing was pretty smooth on Saturday… a little long, but nothing too unusual.
I came in tonight to unload the kiln as usual. Brick by brick, shelf by shelf, post by post.

It wasn’t until I got about halfway through that I could finally see that the bag-wall
on the left of the kiln had fallen in. The bag wall is a row of bricks stacked two high
that separates the incoming flames from the stack of shelves & pots. The flames enter
the back of the kiln on both sides and shoot towards the front. When the kiln is close
to its top temperature, I inject a combination of soda ash & soda bicarbonate into
the kiln through ports on the front of the kiln. I dump the soda mixture in on both
sides so that it falls right into the fire box – which is created by the bag-wall.
The bag-wall creates a wall to protect the pots and direct the flame pattern
throughout the kiln.

So… without the bag-wall in place, the soda mixture was able to “run rampant”
throughout the kiln. Some of my pots have a little too much soda build-up on them,
some are a little too gray with carbon trapping. But the rest of them… BEAUTIFUL!!!

Luckily, the fallen bricks did not hinder the firing itself. The fallen bricks could have
gotten in the way of the flames going into the kiln. So I was lucky… and a few overly
blasted pots is a small price to pay for a kiln full of BEAUTIFUL!!!