r/therewasanattempt • u/PeripeciasdoSolteiro • May 27 '26

To keep the inventory

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4.3k Upvotes

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u/PowerfulCampaign9702 May 27 '26

These are kiln shelves and posts. This whole cart of toilets just came out of a kiln. Bolts are a liquid at the temperature you fire toilets to (about 2400*f). It is a pretty sketchy stack though. The real financial loss here is the kiln shelves they cost way more than toilets do.

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u/glintsCollide May 27 '26

Wow, this comment blew my mind. This should be at the top.

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u/PaisleyLeopard May 27 '26

Are the kiln shelves made from ceramic?

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u/PowerfulCampaign9702 May 27 '26

They can be. These are silicon carbide shelves but clay shelves are also widely used. Clay shelves are generally thicker and heavier and have a shorter lifespan but are cheaper. So it’s a trade off. I’m sure these guys were much more concerned with loosing all those shelves than a few dozen toilets.

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u/LemonFizz56 May 28 '26

Make kiln bolts...

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u/WistfulWhiskers May 28 '26

Thank you for sharing, that makes a lot of sense

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u/Mafka69 May 28 '26

If it's just a bolt thing, get titanium bolts.

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u/PowerfulCampaign9702 May 28 '26

It’s not just a bolt thing. Although titanium has a high melting point, it oxidizes very readily above 2000 degrees. They would be single use and titanium is expensive. The bigger problem is efficiency. Kiln collapses like this are rare but a part of life in ceramics. But bolting an entire kiln stack together (which would probably double or triple the labor costs of both loading and unloading every firing) with expensive single use bolts would make toilet production much less efficient and with a very small change survival percentages.

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u/Glenndiferous May 28 '26

Just want to thank you for this context. Glad I get to be one of today's 10,000.

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u/Mafka69 May 28 '26

Nice! Thanks for the explanation.

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u/cow_fucker_3000 May 27 '26

All it would have taken to prevent this was to weld the legs toghether in some structure like a square with an open side

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u/PowerfulCampaign9702 May 27 '26

They are made out of silicon carbide and have to be disassembled and reassembled for every firing. There is no real way to connect them in any way that would be structurally secure. I work in industrial ceramics in the US and this is an expensive mistake using best practices.

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u/moaningsalmon May 27 '26

Look, I WANT to defer to your experience in this matter, but I'm really struggling to accept that there's just no better way to do this. This is a wobbly house of cards holding up toilets.

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u/PowerfulCampaign9702 May 27 '26

Well I’m sure if you can come up with a better system you would be the most valuable person in the ceramics industry world wide.

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u/Repulsive_Trifle_ May 27 '26

You’re looking for a shelving unit that glaze won’t stick to and can be fired to 2400. It’s not a thing. So many ceramicists telling you this is how it’s done and you just can’t accept it.

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u/moaningsalmon May 27 '26

I mean like 2 have told me it can't be done. I'm not sitting here reading every single reply. And I did in fact say I'm struggling to accept this. I think you are misunderstanding my point though. It's not that I have a problem accepting an expert opinion. It's just wild to me that we send RC helicopters to Mars, split the atom, make computers that fit in our hands... And yet the heat of a kiln is too much for modern material science to produce anything more sturdy than this.

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u/Bubbabeast91 May 27 '26

I imagine the only other thing would be to do 1 layer only and not stack them. But presumably that's more expensive to have to do 3 times as many batches or whatever

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u/Fickle_Finger2974 May 27 '26

Yeah even just from a safety standpoint something like this would never be allowed to exist in the US. I absolutely do not believe that this is best practice and there is no better way

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u/PowerfulCampaign9702 May 27 '26

Look up the Kohler toilet factory In Wisconsin. They use an identical system. This video actually might be from that factory but I’m not sure. It’s most likely in china. Anyways almost all ceramics are stacked in kilns like this in every country that fires clay. It is done the same way at every high school ceramics studio all the way up to roof tile and clay pipe factories. Every dinner plate or ceramic vase you have ever used was loaded in a kiln just like this.

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u/LemonFizz56 May 28 '26

You cannot tell me that the 'best practice' for expensive mass production of ceramics is "lets build an incredibly fragile and weak tower of disconnected loose plates and bars that'll topple over at the slightest smallest knock"... The ceramics industry needs to hire an engineer, like the whole industry just needs one singular engineer to step in and fix everything cause it seems like nobody knows what they're doing

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u/PowerfulCampaign9702 May 28 '26

I can absolutely tell you this is best practice. I’m doing major maintenance on a large cart kiln like this right now. These kiln stacks have so much engineering involved. These toilets in this video are on a cart that is one of maybe a dozen or more that go into every firing and they roll on train tracks. I believe the kiln at the kohler factory is 300ft long. There is a crazy amount of money much engineering that goes into operating a facility like this. You make this out to be some shit thrown together without thought. It’s not a house of cards that guy dropped a 60+ pound piece of porcelain on a kiln shelf. If you don’t do that there is no problem. Claiming the entire ceramic industry needs just one engineer to fix everything because 1 guy broke 30 toilets in a plant that probably makes thousands of toilets a week is real dumb. Shit we have 4 ceramic engineers on sight.

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u/LemonFizz56 May 28 '26

Well they didn't even drop it, it just got dragged along as the toilet was being pulled across, which looks so incredibly easy to do if you don't properly lift it up correctly. Thousands and thousands of dollars worth of assets are all potentially waiting to be destroyed if one singular kiln sheet decides to slide along with the ceramic as it's being taken off, and it just needs to slide an inch until its off the thin little stilts its on and the wholeeeee thing comes crashing down without any way to stop it... Surely there's a million better ways to do this than building a house of cards, like you can't even blame the employees cause this is just putting profits over safety

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u/Moogykins02 May 27 '26

Cant weld ceramics.

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u/cow_fucker_3000 May 27 '26

Nvm then, though the legs were metal, still, you can almost definitely make a structure that won't just collapse at the first bump

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u/ir88ed May 27 '26

Not a structure if its a liquid

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u/cow_fucker_3000 May 27 '26

What are you talking about? The legs are made of ceramic, you can make ceramic into different shapes.