The curing process...I may be confused

[james]

Re: The curing process...I may be confused

The way I think about it is that you are drying to "bake out" the water from your bricks, concrete, vermiculite concrete, and mortar without getting that water so hot that it makes steam -- which causes cracks and stress.

Too low and slow and you don't actually bake the water out.
Too hot and fast and you make steam.

The FB curing instructions call for long low fires starting at 300?F, and going up in 50?F increments each day.

Helpful?
James

[Breven]

Can someone explain the curing process to me a little better?

As I build the progressively larger fires, do I try to maintain the heat for a period of time, long enough for all of the bricks to warm up?

I built fire #2 last night, added a few small peices of wood to the newspaper. It didn't last very long. I started to think that perhaps I should have continued to add some small peices of wood to heat the oven all the way through- controlling how hot it gets by only adding small slivers of wood to maintain the small fire size.
I put my hand on the floor near the opening after the fire went out (took maybe 7 min) and the bricks we're hardly even warm.

What's the secret to a proper cure?