core recipes and parts catalog

[hpmer]

I usually give mine at least a week or two, but I think others fire their's within a day or two.

[matt walker]

I'm a "burn it dry" guy, myself. I'm not sure how much that exacerbates cracking, since I've never been patient enough to air dry one. I did wait a week once, and it didn't seem a whole lot drier than it was after only 24 hours.

[Lollykoko]

It seems like temperature and humidity would affect your drying time considerably. If you are in a place (season) where the temperature is under 50 degrees, I think you'll need a little more time.

[abarlow]

I started drying mine last night. It cracked a lot in the feed tube area where some chunks of the inner wall were falling off. I used plywood as the inner mold. Should have used backer board. It didn't dry out a ton after about 3 hours of burning.

I might have used too much perlite. But i just kept running out of fireclay. I used nearly 3 bags of fireclay with the 6 inch insert in the standard 16x16x32 sized box.

I also found that it mixes very different if you add the ingredients in different orders! Fireclay +water then perlite is much different than water +perlite then fireclay....

[matt walker]

[abarlow]

I think i preferred adding the clay to water first. Then adding perlite. I found if the perlite was added to the water before the water was in the clay, that the perlite just soaked up all the water...