Kiln

Kiln in Gearwe, a small settlement built using archaeological findings on Anglo-Saxon buildings.

A kiln is a thermally insulated chamber, a type of oven, that produces temperatures sufficient to complete some process, such as hardening, drying, or chemical changes. Kilns have been used for millennia to turn objects made from clay into pottery, tiles and bricks. Various industries use rotary kilns for pyroprocessing to calcinate ores, limestone to lime for cement, and to transform many other materials.

Building instructions

Making an improvised furnace can be as simple as digging a small pit unto the ground, cutting a small groove into the edge to allow air from a set of leather bag bellows and placing a turf cap over the pit. A kiln's basic structure consists in a firebox, a grate and a wall.

Mud

A simple kiln can be built by digging a trench into a slope, which in turn needs a grate to let the fire through it and a wall, which can be made of mud.

Termite clay

Clay from termite mounds can be used to build a kiln. In this case, dry chunks are taken and mixed with water to slake the clay, alternatively by stepping on it. Adding dead palm fronds is recommended to stop the clay from cracking as it dries and to add insulation to the kiln. A trench is then dug to form a firebox and a wall of clay is made in front of it, digging a hole into it to allow air flow into the firebox. Make a grate from ordinary clay, place it on top of the firebox and build the of the ware chamber around the great.

Make grate bar from termite clay and place them into the firebox, which are important to lift the firewood off the ground and allow air to move up through the fuel bed for more efficient combustion. An alternative is burning wood as a heap on the ground, which allows cold air to flow up and over the coals and cools the kiln, but it is much less efficient than grate bars.

Temperature

Normally, a natural draft furnace using wood, a kiln, can reach up to 1400 Celsius degrees (or 2552 Fahrenheit), while a furnace that uses fuel such as charcoal can reach temperatures up to 1600 °C (2912 °F) degrees.

Dependencies

• Charcoal
• Coal
• Fire
• Fuel
• Wood
  • Bloomery furnace
  • Kiln
  • Oven
    • Brick
    • Clay
    • Iron ore
    • Sponge iron

See also

• Bellows
• Copper smelting
• Knife
• Shelter

External links

• Primitive Technology: Termite clay kiln & pottery - Primitive Technology, 24 March 2017, YouTube
• Primitive Technology: Crossdraft kiln - Primitive Technology, 12 July 2019, YouTube
• Primitive Technology: Brick Firing Kiln - Primitive Technology, 29 November 2019, YouTube
• Chimney and pots - primitivetechnology.wordpress.com, 30 October 2015
• Barrel Tiled Shed - primitivetechnology.wordpress.com, 16 September 2016

This article uses material from the Wikipedia article Kiln, which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License (view authors).