Dear Tech Talk friends,
This week's firing blog is pretty exciting — Cindy and Dave sent me off to Skutt School in October! Whew!
Technically, this was a repair and maintenance training hosted by Skutt Ceramic Products that is currently reserved for clay distributors and community art centers. With their bright and shiny new initiative Kids Need Clay, they are hoping to encourage teachers and school districts to invest in lasting clay equipment and supplies as well as help them to advocate for and maintain successful art programs. Part of this includes matching schools with experienced distributors that will help maintain, repair, and train them on their ceramics equipment.
We are lucky enough to work closely with many districts in Lawrence, the KC Metro, and surrounding areas to make their art programs a reality in this way.
From www.skutt.com
But getting back to the tech-y stuff; this was a truly invaluable training for repair technicians from many backgrounds — from little experience to years of repairing kilns.
We spent much of the first day touring various areas in their facility, from their exciting new brick-cutting machine engineered specifically for Skutt (of which photos were not allowed!) to their electrical department and even the area where Skutt wheels are made.
Skutt's Dawson tube assembly area, for the popular Kiln Sitter kilns
We got down to business and had a great lesson on electrical theory and power supply, followed by kiln troubleshooting and diagnostics, element & brick replacement, and learning how to install various upgrade kits (like the new touchscreen upgrade!)
The next day, we focused on more niche aspects of Skutt products, like testing zone control, changing settings in the kiln's hidden menus, doing single and three phase conversions, replacing solid state relays, and making sense of the "wire spaghetti" in Skutt's PK (production) style kilns. We also had the opportunity to take apart some Skutt wheels — and even solved an ongoing issue with one of their test wheels. Exciting stuff!
Skutt's Manufacturing Facility and Office, in beautiful Portland, Oregon
Zeynep Uner is the current kiln and wheel repair apprentice at Bracker’s, working directly with David Sturm (the head tech) on repairs large and small. She has been repairing kilns for approximately 3 years now, and has been absorbing everything she possibly can from David’s 30+ years in the field.
Zeynep enjoys atmospheric firing, taking film photos, and throwing on her old Brent kick wheel.
