The robins are bobbing around in the yard. What a beautiful day. Too bad I just lost four paragraphs of text because I forgot to open a new window to do a search for the
Catawba Valley Pottery Festival, at which we will be selling new pots at the end of March.
Oh well, it's par for the course. I tried to fire my electric kiln twice recently, only to find out that it didn't want to rise in temperature above 800 degrees.
Well, today I didn't want to unload this kiln and load the newer kiln, so I opened up the computer panel to take a look. Yep, two wires were burnt off a panel of connections. I needed two new wire connectors, the kind that you slide a wire into and crimp it and then screw the other end onto a panel with a separate screw.
I didn't have any, but I had an aha moment and wondered if I could fashion a connector out of a bag of simple electrical sleeves that I always get when I order new elements for the kiln. These simple sleeves are made to slide the element into and crimp, then slide the wire into and crimp.
I needed something to slide the wire into on one end and something to screw it onto a panel with on the other end. So - using a vise, hacksaw, vise grips, electric bench grinder, hammer and anvil, and a drill and drill bit - I altered one side of sleeve and it worked.
Fired the bisque kiln yesterday. Unloaded it today and finished glazing a few pieces for an order and loaded the newer kiln. I put four sets of cones in this kiln because the last firing was over-fired a bit.
In the midst of it all, I attended the North Carolina Potters Conference this weekend in Asheboro. I did manage to make a few large steins and other pots for the next wood firing yesterday.
The pictures are taken with Photo Booth on my Macbook Pro, as I lost the little digital card from my camera after taking it out of the camera along with the battery because I left the camera out in the rain recently.
I hope tomorrow's a nice day as well.
Sorry about the text being all one paragraph. Apparently, I did something wrong by typing in "HTML" instead of "Compose" in Blogger. I've never had that happen before. I better hurry up and publish before something else messes up.
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| Jug with hips |
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| Large pitcher with runner stamp |
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| Steins (handle pulled from the bottom) |
