Glost Kiln Firing

What goes into the kilns looks like a layer of icing coating a strangely shaped cake. As it passed through the firing zone, the fluxes melt and dissolve the additives in the glaze fuse everything together into a thin layer which sticks to the core.

At Royal Stafford, we use "Intermittent" kilns to fire our glazed ware. We have two gas kilns and three electric kilns.

The flatware items are placed into kiln furniture referred to as cranks. This is a piece of apparatus designed to keep the pieces of ware separate once the glaze has been applied. It also stops the ware sticking together during firing. The cranks are then placed onto kiln cars which go into the kiln on tracks. The kiln can hold 2 or 3 trucks at any one time.

Glost firing has a 12 hour cycle so there are two firings each day with the temperature in the kiln reaching 1030ºC.

Once the firing is completed and the ware is cool enough to handle, it is unloaded and fed into a ginnetting machine to remove the refractory pin marks left on the plate at the points where it is supported by the crank. It must be noted at this stage that the three pin marks will still be visible on the back of the plates. This is inherent in the production of Tableware and should not be regarded as a fault.