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Post by seanrua on Oct 6, 2013 20:38:08 GMT
I may be in the wrong section here, but does anybody know a good substitute for fireclay? In fact, I'm struggling to find any ordinary clay at present, short of going out with a spade at night!
What I'm doing is sealing around a flue. Whatever I use will have to stand high temperatures. Whenever we got a bit of a leak in the tunnels there wasn't much better than ordinary clay to stem it. Then we could use such things as Sika etc. However, dealing with heat is different. Thermal movement and cracking is quite normal. The proprietary stuff is very expensive, imo, so I'm intending bodging up with something cheaper.
CO Warning!
Do NOT follow my lead: carbon monoxide and flue gases are dangerous.
sean rua.
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Post by robmac on Oct 7, 2013 10:50:58 GMT
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Post by n brown on Oct 7, 2013 13:37:56 GMT
any pottery has clay
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Post by seanrua on Oct 7, 2013 16:40:45 GMT
Thanks, lads.
I'm out of position ( blue clay is what i normally use), but what I've done is bodge up with a mixture of sharp sand, cement and plaster!
If i survive, I'll report back regarding the success or otherwise. The actual flue is sealed, but I'm building a bit of a block wall to hide it. Btw, this is a daft and dangerous thing to do; don't try this at home! I've jammed the blocks and bits of blocks in real tight. Cutting the thermolites with an old saw was too much fun to resist. Tomorrow I'll light up and see what the heat does. Then i think I'll render with the same old splodge. I want to use up all the old bits in bags before I go to Ireland. At this time of year, dry powders don't stay too dry and tend to go off, even when wrapped in plastic bags.
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Post by robmac on Oct 7, 2013 16:49:53 GMT
Agree about cutting thermolites Sean. Very satisfying.
By the way, we were at the meet at Rutland water at the weekend, when an Ice Cream van drove onto the site, it would have made a great picture as it went past our vans, but I was too slow!
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Post by seanrua on Oct 7, 2013 19:25:56 GMT
Cheers, Robmac. I had something about icecream men getting a frosty reception, but I can't find it now. It was discovered when I was checking out something about French Travellers in Lancashire. Because things seemed to have eased off on that front, I didn't put these up before, but now that you've mentioned an ICV, I'll put up links to a couple of articles. This has echoes of another forum, I'm afraid, where articles from regional papers are seized upon with relish, even though said event or problem is hundreds of miles from "Irate of Winchester" or whoever it is that's having a whinge. ( Btw, I noted your bit about the bstrds who damaged the graves and thought you were entitled to be angry.) OK, here we go: www.thisislancashire.co.uk/archive/2004/11/19/5807648.Pensioner_exposed_himself_as_girl_queued_for_ice_cream/Effin' pensioners, etc etc. And one about the French travellers: they praise Blackburn ( yes, Blackburn, tha knaws!) but are a bit disparaging about English travellers. Needless to say, as soon as the French set a precedent, Paddy's lot were in there like a flash. Cue, enter Derek, aka whoever, with his party piece. www.thisislancashire.co.uk/news/10559710._Blackburn_is_a_paradise___say_French_gipsies_enjoying_a_break_at_Ewood/?ref=ar--- I was in Ireland at the time, but I don't remember any major fuss on the other forum over this. Perhaps they were all too busy looking for stolen caravans or something. sean rua.
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Post by n brown on Oct 7, 2013 20:14:16 GMT
cutting thermolite with a saw ?buncha wusses,knife through butter ! i used to cut up bsth stone [oolite] all day with my old wood saw. mind you I hated it !
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Post by seanrua on Oct 8, 2013 8:58:35 GMT
Ah sure, that's not a hard rock at all, n.brown!
When we were in Australia there was one rock called the Boomerang Malachite or somesuch. If you hit it with a sledgehammer you'd bounce back twice as far away from where you started! Or was that the SH 1t to the power n? Can't remember now. There was only one answer for it: shoot on sight! Gelignite or "fracteur" as it was called there, did the trick, provided you didn't get miss-fires, which I did regularly. Drilled into a live det one time - all bc of the missfires. I was useless at hardrock mining. Mind you the hard luck story was another matter: like the words of the song, we owed our souls to the company store. Sometimes we didn't make enough to cover the cost of the explosives ( which we had to buy off the company). We'd have to work the next fortnight just to get back in front.
A bit like the gambling game, really. One bloke from Queensland was very good and very greedy. he used to fire illegally at "smoko" ( break time), using fuse tapes and a box of matches. One day I got blown up, or blown down, in fact, by the concussion of the air coming along the drive from one of his explosions! Never could hear properly since. Oh, btw, that fella owned three houses and a hotel and a boat. Not sure whether he was the proud owner of an ICV, but, the only time i got one over on him was when there was a race to the smelter and back - a half marathon. I came second to a Kiwi, who was way ahead, but this Queenslander was breathing down my neck in the last hundred yards. He reckoned he only found out you were allowed to run in the race near the last mile. Till then he'd been walking! What can ye say?
sean rua.
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