In the past I’ve always done my saggar/barrel fires in a big fifty gallon drum. It’s heavy, hard to manage and requires lots of wood to do the firing. In addition, it’s not worth doing unless you’ve got 20-30 pots to fire.
Finding this new solution to saggar/barrel firing has made the process quicker, easier, requires less wood and you can fire a small load.
The solution is a compost barrel with legs for air flow, plenty of holes to allow for oxygen and a good lid.
This is a product from Behren’s. I found mine at a local farm supply. store.
Each piece was wrapped in aluminum foil with some sawdust, copper carb, cobalt oxide, and a few other combustibles. My friend, Sharon Schull, joined in on this firing and our saggars combined gave us 14 small to medium size packets. They all fit in the saggar great!
We started the fire in the bin about 3 in the afternoon and unloaded it about 9pm. So the process from start to finish took about 10 hours.
Here are a couple of my little pod vessels that came out of this firing:
Happy potting and thanks for reading!!
Marian
