Renovation of an historic bottle kiln

The Gladstone Pottery Museum is a former manufacturing site that has been converted into a working museum with potters demonstrating the traditional crafts involved in the process. 

A bottle kiln comprises an external bottle shaped shell of brickwork known as a hovel, and an inner firing kiln know as an oven.  The brickwork of the oven is bound with iron or steel bands consisting of short straps known as bonts.  Pots to be fired are stacked inside the oven in saggars.

Conservation of bottle kiln no 4 involved the repair of the brickwork of the hovel and the replacement of broken bonts to the inner oven. 

Decayed bricks were cut out and replaced with a matching black, imperial sized brick. The outer and inner surfaces were repointed with lime mortar, coloured with soot, to match the existing black mortar.

Almost 40 new bonts were forged by the blacksmith at Etruria Museum and fitted to stabilise the oven in three new complete bands.