Janine and I are recently returned from Korea where we were invited to take part in the Mungyeong Ceramics Festival, where I delivered a paper to the ceramics conference there about low impact wood firing.

My paper concentrated on my research into small down draught fire box design, intended to minimise smoke and pollution as much as possible. I also presented my current work on afterburners and scrubbers to try to minimise particulate pollution from our kiln chimneys.

I believe that these topics will become more important over time as Global Heating and carbon in the atmosphere starts to become obvious and difficult to ignore. Even to conservatives.

My paper was well received and I got some good interrogation during the question time afterwards. My book ‘Laid Back Wood Firing’ was  translated into Korean about 5 years ago and has been available there for some time, so some people there had read it and were up to speed with the concept.

Janine and I will be returning to Korea later in the year to build one of my small Bourry Box kilns as a demonstration of how it can work. It will be built alongside several older traditional wood fired kilns. They are interested to compare the smoke from our firing and also the fired results afterward with that from the traditional kilns.

The most recently built, traditional, multi-chamber kiln was fired while we were there. It smoked all the way through the firing. I’m pretty sure that we can do better!

Its a really beautiful kiln to look at, and is constructed using the very old method of using cone shaped hand made ‘bricks’.

The cones were all made on site by the students/residents in the ceramic research centre at the Yanggu Porcelain Village.

The use of cone shapes allows for a rather nice dome shaped top or 3D arch over each of the fire box and 4 chambers.

The freshly built kiln took just 24 hours for it’s first firing – all 4 chambers to stoneware, absolutely no technology was use. No pyrometers or cones, just an experienced firing crew and home made draw trials of glazed tiles pulled at 30 minute intervals after orange heat.

This kiln was so new, it was still wet, and steam was coming out of all the cracks all the way to top temperature.

Side stoking is always a dirty business. Hard to get around that. It’s the nature of the beast.

That is why I have chosen to build a single chamber bourry box fired kiln as the demo model.

It will be a larger sized chamber, so I have designed it with 2 fireboxes side by side.

Only time will tell if it works the way I intend and if it impresses them.

When you are in Seoul and the air quality is rated as ‘fair’, but you can only see for 1 km through the smog. I makes you think about what a bad day might be like. Smoke from wood firing is not the big problem in the scheme of things.

But every little bit counts.