How To Build An Inside-out Kiln - Part 2

Sure, it's easy enough to pile a bunch of bricks on top of each other and say that they're an inside out kiln. But what actually makes it inside out?

I had a lot of time to think about how I was going to build this kiln as I hauled all 500 bricks from Paul's wharf to the kiln site 3km over land. In the end I decided to go with a double-bourry box kiln. It is the kind that I used during my NSCAD days and the kind that I am most familiar with. You can see an archetypal double-bourry box kiln here.

It is a very straightforward design. There is a large ware chamber in the middle with one firebox on each side. The fireboxes have two sections - a combustion chamber on top where fuel (wood) is burned, and an ash pit below that doubles as a flame channel. This is a very simple diagram of a double bourry-box kiln:



Note the lovely pot in the ware chamber, the fires in the combustion chambers and the ashes in the ash pits. To turn this kiln inside out I decided to dissect the design down the middle so that essentially I would end up with two halves. Then I transposed the two halves so that the fireboxes were overlapping:



The final step was to discard the unnecessary or physically unstable parts, most notably the arch/roof:



In this configuration the ware chamber is relocated to an undefined region to the left and right of the (now single) firebox. In principle I could say that virtually anything is within this new ware chamber - even the whole island. Compare the diagram to how the kiln actually looked when it was finished: