Long story short, I've baked my lid in the oven but I'm left with hard-packed and baked but not solid or rock-like sand. I used fireclay, play sand and water only, exactly as the book describes.After re-reading the Gingery section on curing the refractory, it seems there might be another interpretation. It sounds like maybe "curing" only drives out the water and then "vitrifying" makes it really solid. Is that true? Or should I have essentially a millstone when I take it out of the oven?Pictures here, the last two items are mainly about the lid.

It seems to me (not at all a physics genius) that you had a mixture ofsand, clay and water. When you put it in your oven you are simply going todrive out the water. This should allow you to move onto the next step,which is to put this lid fearlessly on over your oven and fire it up. Atthat point the clay should fuse and the refractory should harden. That'smy guess anyway.Back a few years you could email Dave Gingery. Don't know anymore. Someoneon this NG will know about this for sure.Nice blow-by-blow description.Grant ErwinPhysicsGenius wrote:

Does not work with my IE6 either, but ok with Opera.GeoffHNorfolk - UK

What went wrong with my Gingery refractory?

Dec 23, 2003 27 Replies

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Gunner 22 years ago

It wanted to download or or open the page. I chose Open

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'If you own a gun and have a swimming pool in the yard, the swimming pool is almost 100 times more likely to kill a child than the gun is.'" Steven Levitt, UOC prof.

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Duncan Munro 22 years ago

That's it. Driving the water out is essential to avoid it turning in to steam and bits of refractory exploding off. Once this is done, I believe the next phase is called 'calcining' where you take the lining up to high temperature, that's when it goes hard.

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GeoffH 22 years ago

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PhysicsGenius 22 years ago

I did a couple experiments last night. I took my leftover mix (about

1/2 cup, I cut it really close) and added some water so it was too wet. Then I let it evaporate until it seemed about right. Then I took a propane torch to it until it stopped steaming. It wasn't cement-like either, but it was a lot harder than my lid. My lid is like dried dirt--easy to poke a screwdriver into. Despite what everyone is saying (and I agree with) about how the lid isn't supposed to be "fused" yet, I think there's still a problem with it. So I'm going to break up the lid (which I forgot to add a handle to anyway), add more water this time and try again. Since it's so soft, it's basically just dried out fireclay and sand, so I haven't lost any ingredients.

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MikeM 22 years ago

I have a coke-burning furnace with a grate arranged in a similar way, except that the ash outlet exits the furnace bottom at about a 30 deg. angle to reach a clean-out door at the side of the furnace shell near the base. Don't know about the refueling pipe idea though, you might get it to work but it seems to me that it would be difficult to get the fuel evenly distributed around the crucible. Mike.

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DoN. Nichols 22 years ago

But W3C breaks older browsers.

And updated browsers for systems other than Windows lag behind those for Windows (except in Mozilla).

And IE is certainly not available for all systems.

However, I can't check the behavior at all right now. Even traceroute dies before it gets there.

Enjoy, DoN.

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Jim Wilson 22 years ago

I'm running IE 6.0, with all the service packs and latest updates. It still doesn't handle the page properly.

Jim

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Loren Coe 22 years ago

jfwiw, my ie pukes on it, but Netscape (7.1) does fine. this is Win98. --Loren

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