Project description
We have a masonry heating and cooking stove in the house and I am looking for one craftsman who can both make the tiles and set them. The stove was built this spring: the body measures about 1020 by 640 millimetres at the base and stands 2100 millimetres to the top slab. Three faces are open to the room and have to be clad, together with the corner beside the two warming niches. By my own measurements that is roughly six and a half square metres, so somewhere near two hundred field tiles plus corner pieces, a cornice course and a plinth course. The brickwork has cured, the joints are pointed, and I have run three small fires through it with no cracking anywhere.
I want proper stove tiles with a rumpa box on the back, not thin ceramic glued onto the wall. Body clay can be a light firing clay or the local red one with grog added, twice fired, with a glaze that does not craze over the shoulder of the tile. The pattern should stay quiet: a smooth field the colour of baked milk, a sparse cobalt brush stroke over about a quarter of each tile, and plain warm sand tones for the cornice and the plinth. The rumpa should be 55 to 65 millimetres deep, with holes for the cramps and a rim the binding wire can catch on. Before you go into production I would like two or three fired sample tiles so that we agree on the glaze colour in daylight and not from a photograph.
Fitting should follow the old method: cramps driven into the bed joints, soft annealed wire threaded through the rumpas, the cavity packed with a clay and sand mortar mixed with brick rubble and broken shards, joints between tiles no wider than a millimetre and a half, and edges rubbed down in place. Pay particular attention to the corner run and to the way the tiles meet the firebox door and the oven frame, so that nothing pinches the metal. After fitting the stove must dry naturally with no heat at all, then be brought up slowly over a week, starting with kindling.
What I expect from you:
— fired sample tiles before the main batch, and a written note of the clay and glaze used;
— a tile count and a cutting plan for the corners, made from your own module rather than mine;
— fitting on cramps, wire and clay mortar, with the cavity properly packed;
— your own drying and first firing schedule in writing;
— photographs of each stage and a tidy site at the end of every working day.
I want proper stove tiles with a rumpa box on the back, not thin ceramic glued onto the wall. Body clay can be a light firing clay or the local red one with grog added, twice fired, with a glaze that does not craze over the shoulder of the tile. The pattern should stay quiet: a smooth field the colour of baked milk, a sparse cobalt brush stroke over about a quarter of each tile, and plain warm sand tones for the cornice and the plinth. The rumpa should be 55 to 65 millimetres deep, with holes for the cramps and a rim the binding wire can catch on. Before you go into production I would like two or three fired sample tiles so that we agree on the glaze colour in daylight and not from a photograph.
Fitting should follow the old method: cramps driven into the bed joints, soft annealed wire threaded through the rumpas, the cavity packed with a clay and sand mortar mixed with brick rubble and broken shards, joints between tiles no wider than a millimetre and a half, and edges rubbed down in place. Pay particular attention to the corner run and to the way the tiles meet the firebox door and the oven frame, so that nothing pinches the metal. After fitting the stove must dry naturally with no heat at all, then be brought up slowly over a week, starting with kindling.
What I expect from you:
— fired sample tiles before the main batch, and a written note of the clay and glaze used;
— a tile count and a cutting plan for the corners, made from your own module rather than mine;
— fitting on cramps, wire and clay mortar, with the cavity properly packed;
— your own drying and first firing schedule in writing;
— photographs of each stage and a tidy site at the end of every working day.
Other / Miscellaneous Cash, Bank transfer
