Why one kiln for two cones gets messy

If your members work in both mid-range and high-fire clay bodies, you already know the argument: a half-full cone 10 load sits for two weeks because nobody wants to fire it empty, and the cone 6 people keep jumping the queue.

We asked three studios how they handle it.

Fixed days

Hollow Pine Clay in Asheville fires cone 6 on Mondays and Thursdays and cone 10 on the first and third Saturday. A load fires on its day whether it is full or not. Members plan around it, and the owner says complaints dropped to almost nothing once the calendar was posted.

Fill threshold

Mudroom Ceramics fires a load once it reaches 80% of the shelf space, whichever cone it is. Kilnbook shows the fill level for each queue, so members can see when their load is close.

Hybrid

Fireweed Studio uses fixed days for cone 6 and a fill threshold for cone 10, because high-fire members are fewer and more patient.

What we built from this

Each kiln in Kilnbook can now have a schedule rule per cone: a fixed day, a fill threshold, or both. Members see the next expected firing date on their piece, which answers the question before they ask it.