By the end of my first year of ceramics classes in high school I was taken enough with the medium to want to work at home over the summer. I bought a wheel, a Pacifica Kit, and started to build a kiln in my back yard. I had no knowledge of propane, natural gas would have required copious plumbing and inspections. I built a wood fired raku kiln.
The softbrick were purchased about 7 miles from my house. I borrowed some red brick that was not in a returnable state when I was done, and found a sewer tile for the top of the chimney. Even with this I did not have enough brick for a firebox. Fortunately our soil where I lived was a pebbly glacial clay. It was full of lime, but for this purpose it did not matter. I dug a firebox. I was worried about it collapsing so I lined it with 3″ logs, and roofed the back of it near the kiln with more wood, covered on top with soil. I figured the wood would take a long time to burn and I could replace it. This worked out to be at least 4 hours of firing. My first few firings were started with small two inch cuttings picked up on the street, and finished with piano keys that I had salvaged ebony and ivory off of for my father’s harpsichords that he built as a hobby.
For a high schooler I was not poor. I had a two night a week dishwashing job at Oriental City restuarant, and I sang in a professional choir for a local synagogue. In three hours singing I earned about 1.5 times as much as an 8 hour shift washing dishes. But still I preferred spending money on other things and buying ceramics supplies was about 2 hours of driving during the week when time was often scarce.  Wanting glaze, and having already read perhaps 25 books on ceramics I decided that I could make my own with 20 Muleteam ® Borax and ground bottle glass. It worked! Later I started adding Colemanite to the mix. For raku, not kitchenware this was fine. I needed colorants. Blue bottle glass did not have enough blue in it to see over my clay, so I made some colorants. I got iron oxide by burning steel wool that I got from my father and copper oxide was gotten by heating copper wire up and then bending it to get the oxide off.  I had taken Chemistry in 10th grade. Knowledge is power!
Lots of other things happened in that kiln, most things were mundane except that the pots and surfaces added to my thoughts, and the process was educational. But at some point I began wondering how three dimensional I could get glaze to be, and then it dawned on me that I could add grog to my glaze. I gave it a go. I was not great at recording images of my work back then. I did not have my own camera, and using a roll of film for one or two objects did not make sense but I did get an image of one of these raku pieces. Its not much of an image. I never did much with these glazes but it was interesting. A
After the Wood buring Raku kiln I made other kilns, several at the summer camp I worked at. The first used charcoal and a blower. and about seven bricks. It fired one teabowl at a time. Another, a few years later visiting a friend was inside a hollow piece of tree trunk. Like the raku kiln firebox, the kiln provided some of the fuel. Years later I built a small kiln out of used phone books. Phone books were how we found phone numbers. You would get updated versions each year and in generall they covered the city you were in and nearby ones too.



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