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Sorry for your loss Wiley. No need to apologize to us, we'll be here whenever you get back to it.

Back in the saddle, I've built the riser and insulated it and started cobbing the exhaust. Cletus Pew is right, our red clay is perfect for cob. I had to back off on the amount of sand I added because it was getting to stiff to use by hand, my recipe (which is totally scientific) is one 4 cuft wheelbarrow full of red clay, 25 lbs of sand, 8-10 big handfulls of cut straw and add water to taste...err...feel. I spent a lot of time worrying about my manifold and used rocks to create a nice dry stack of how i wanted it to look, a ton of building and tearing back and generally wasted a lot of time. If I had realized cob was as awesome as it is I wouldn't have even considered a stone for that area.

Anyone that reads this is is intimidated by the manifold area, here is a word of advice: just use cob! Don't over think it! KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid!)

Anyways, hopefully I can get some pictures tonight, its hard to take pictures with red mud up to your elbows!

Thanks for the support guys, I'm glad to be a part of a group like you!

Wiley, I'm so glad you are moving forward! I think Manny, myself, and others here have all made the same comments. Just get muddy! You can ask questions all day, and think and plan, but if you haven't gotten muddy yet you are wasting a bunch of time. Let the cob show you the way! I'm being a bit silly, but yeah man, amazing, isn't it? I couldn't even picture my manifold area before I started my first one, and then once I got there I was like, "oh". Just make some mud pies! Glad to have you here, can't wait to see it!

yeah the biggest problem with cob is, you know, getting it. Its back breaking work. I love a little sweat blood and tears, but hauling clay, mixing materials on a tarp then hand carrying it inside to slap around is daunting. I've been getting 2 cob mixes every afternoon which translates to 4 wheel barrows full of clay, 1-1.5 50lb bags of clay and whatever straw mixed in. Thats only about 1.5 hrs worth of work after working for 10 hours at my day job. Sleep has been easy to come by!

Sorry guys, my phone is acting up and the only fix for it is to "upgrade" to ios8 and I'm not prepared to do something like that...but I'll see if i can get my wifey to send me some pics to upload.

I got my dragon fired up this weekend and it was awesome, the wife loved it which is a plus. We probably put a dozen maybe 20 sticks thru its belly yesterday evening with no real issues. I did have some smoke from a couple of spots but we got that squared away quickly. But this morning when I tried to get it rolling again I had a lot of cracks in my cob and smoke escaping the bench. I don't have the whole thing completely cobbed up yet, so I figure thats just part of my process. So this afternoon....MOAR COB!

Thanks for all of your help and insight along the way guys!

Yeah Wiley! So good to hear it's running. When it's all wet, it will be a bear to start when it's cold and will smoke and show cracks. Once it's dry and warm, that behavior will disappear as it should always be drawing as long as it's kinda warm.

You sure that's smoke and not steam coming from your bench? Smell it and if it burns your nose then it's smoke, but I'll bet it's steam in which case I'd just let the thing dry out a bit. I think you built your bench with pipe and if you sealed them as you put them together and then cobbed over them, there really should not be any smoke escaping.

Its smoke, its coming from just above my transition area or manifold whichever term you prefer.

My wife made a couple of batches of sandier cob yesterday while I was at work and covered it up pretty well, we still have a lot of cob to do but its moving along. Yeah it sucks to get going, but once it finally takes off its great!