I rebuilt the firebox and made a few other adjustments on my raku dragon kiln. It has been firing beautifully but the grate burned out at the end of the last firing so I put in some 1/2 inch black pipe and the grate from my grill on top of that. I finished making the changes to it at around 10PM when my friend Peter showed up willing to help fire it. I didn't have the wood all ready yet and some of the pots weren't even glazed and neither of us had eaten anything yet so we had a lot to do before we could get the firing underway. Anyway I wanted to heat up the brick slow because the castable I had used wasn't dry yet and there was a good amount of moisture in the bricks, and... I put a freshly glazed wet platter on the top shelf...soppin wet. Peter made a little fire in the new firebox and we burned with the lid open for an hour or so. At about 850F we heard something break and I was afraid it was the soggy platter, later we found it was a thick planter in the bottom of the chamber. We reached about 1925F and everything matured beautifully except for a couple of refire cups, the platter was brilliant!...a nice coppery oil luster. We finished up between 3 and 4 AM, covered with black soot, tired and happy.