FrogBlog — Ask Arnold

      Have you visited the Kiln Frog Kiln Academy?  If you haven’t, you probably have no idea how much information is on our website.  Just about anything you could ever want to know about kilns and how they work is contained in these pages.  Let’s take a quick overview to help you get some ideas on where you might want to start exploring.     Ask Arnold – Arnold Howard is our kiln guru.  He knows so much about kilns, and he has graciously committed to answering your questions about kilns and how they work.  Arnold was a long-time employee at Paragon Kilns, so...

    Kiln Pointer from Paragon: Arnold's Firebrick Repair Toolbox ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Contents A Firebrick Repair Toolbox Book Recommendation: "Clay: A Studio Handbook" Reader Response Firebrick Repair Toolbox -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------      A Firebrick Repair Toolbox Ever since I left Paragon and became an independent kiln technician, hunting for tools has been my biggest waste of time. So I have sorted my kiln tools into four tool boxes (along with a vacuum cleaner and air compressor). Recently I put all of my firebrick tools into one box where I can find them instantly. Here they are, going clockwise from left to right in the...

This post was written by Arnold Howard, a former employee at Paragon Industries who is now an independent kiln technician at Howard Kiln Services.  The owner of a Paragon A-24B called to tell me he saw sparks flash inside the switch box on his kiln, and the circuit breaker tripped. He could see the flash through the ventilation louvers on the side of the box. “It made a loud noise that scared the hell out of me,” he said. “It happened when I turned the bottom switch to high.”   “Your kiln has a dead short,” I told him. A dead...

Arnold Howard, a former employee at Paragon Industries, is now an independent kiln technician at Howard Kiln Services. For those who don't know him... Arnold started at Paragon in 1977 and worked there for 42 years! Repairing kilns and helping people is Arnold's passion! He is a wealth of knowledge and we welcome his insight! To start things off, we thought we would ask him a few of our most common customer questions... Q. Why would someone choose mercury relays over solid state relays? Is there an advantage to one over the other?  A. Mercury relays are extremely reliable. They...

It's a fact of life that humans are nomadic. We try to settle down in one place, but as comfortable as we get, we eventually pick up all of our stuff and move it to another location. As an artist I am certainly not immune to this condition. Over the last 15 years I will have moved my studio 4 times. First my home, then my first real studio out of my house - 8 years, then the next one - 3 years, now this one - 2 years. The reasons always seem legitimate; bigger space, which eventually raised rents...