My last two firings have been somewhat disappointing. There has been a lot of residual dry ash on and in the pots and it occurs to me that this problem might be solved if I had fired to a higher temperature to melt this ash. I looked at some of the remaining pots from my first firing again today and was really impressed with them. Whilst the first firing wasn't a resounding success by any measures, it did get up to temperature and those pots with an open top don't have that dusty dry ash sat in them.
I thought this thicker palette wood was effective, but now I am wondering if I would be better off with the thinner sweet chestnut strip-wood that predominated in the first firing. One good thing is that I've realised that I can fit longer lengths of wood in to the kiln than I thought at first, so less sawing. I don't know why I couldn't get up to temperature with the palette wood, perhaps I could have done if I'd stuck with it. In the end I had cone 10 bending in the front and cone 7 bending in the rear. That's not overly hot and about the same as the previous firing, whereas in the first firing I got cone 13 down in the front, so whilst I felt at the time that it was hard work achieving temperature it was clearly working.