Uncover the Secrets of MASSIVE Ancient Kilns! | Minecraft Archaeology

hello everyone and welcome back to my channel this is part two of a miniseries where we’re taking a look at how to build a brick works or a place where bricks are made we’ve already talked about making mud bricks so next we’re going to talk about fired bricks so here are all of the choices that you’re going to need to make to build a brick works that are specific to fired bricks and the first choice that you’re going to need to make is what kind of bricks are you making in this brick works now since this is the fired bricks episode I’m kind of assuming that you’ve already already chosen fired bricks but as I said in episode one we’re going to be covering mud bricks fired bricks concrete bricks and compressed Earth blocks in this miniseries so let me just give you a brief description of what they all are mud bricks are made out of mud and a binding material which is usually something organic Like Straw or rice husks or something and they’re dried in the Sun instead of fired in a kiln fired bricks are any brick that’s generally made out of clay or shell and that’s fired in a kiln and Minecraft’s brick item and Bricks block are some examples of fired bricks fired bricks are basically the bricks that you think about when you think about bricks and then there are concrete bricks concrete bricks aren’t fired they’re actually cured and they’re made out of sand gravel and cement and the last main category of brick is compressed Earth blocks or pressed Earth blocks and those are often abbreviated as CB compressed Earth blocks are made from pretty dry subsoil which is basically soil that’s underneath the ground that we walk on brick makers then mix that soil with some clay or maybe even some concrete and then they use a machine that is specially designed to create These Bricks by pressing the soil together at a really high pressure and that makes a compressed Earth block so as I said in this episode we’re going to talk about fired bricks and the choices that you’re going to need to make that only apply to fired bricks so the next choice that you’re going to need to make is why choose fired bricks why are you making fired Bricks now granted again you’ve already made the decision to make fired bricks so you probably have a sense of why you want to make them but it’s important to think about that before we dive into this build fired bricks are pretty quintessential at least in places where I’ve lived like the US and the UK they are an orangey red color generally the color that we think of when we think of bricks and where I’m from in the United States they were used to build a lot of buildings and factories and warehouses for a very long time fired bricks are made out of clay or Shale and they are the only bricks that are fired in a kiln that’s why they’re called fired bricks right so they’re fired in a kiln a lot like Potter is firing the bricks changes the chemical structure of the clay so that the bricks get a lot stronger than they would be if we just dried them in the Sun or just really just dried them in general instead of firing them firing the bricks also makes them a lot less likely to fall apart or to crack and things like that so basically the minerals in the clay what happens when they’re fired is that the silica and the alumina and the lime and such all of those things that are in the clay they vitrify when the brick gets fired and what that means is that basically the minerals in the clay start to turn into glass now just to be like super clear it is not the same as glass bricks are not glass but like the very start of that process happens when we fire clay in a kiln and if something is forming glass then that starts to bind all of the all of the materials in that that brick it binds them together far stronger than if we had just dried it in the air outside and because of that vitrification fired bricks tend to be a lot sturdier than mud bricks fired bricks are also a lot less complicated in terms of materials than things like concrete bricks but one downside to fired bricks is that they do require a lot of materials and a lot of fuel to make so they definitely have a larger carbon footprint than mud bricks do for example so maybe you chose fired bricks because they were sturdier or maybe you chose them because you have easy access to the materials whatever your reasons keep those in mind as you build because they are going to help you make the rest of the decisions that I’m going to talk about in this video the next choice is where are you getting the materials for your bricks for fired bricks you’re going to need a lot of clay or Shale Clay is probably a bit easier in Minecraft you can just build a Clay Pit along a river or build a bit of a clay mine in a lush cave you should also think about how these materials are harvested are people digging the clay out with a shovel or maybe they’ve got a back ho or a digger of some kind for the Shale you might show the Shale mining by building a quarry with stone or andesite standing in for the Shale but also think about how they are mining the Shale are they using pickaxes and a pulley system to bring it to the surface maybe there are mine carts involved or maybe they’re mining it with TNT you could also get like really minecrafty and dangerous with it and have them m Shale using a Wither although you’ll probably lose a fair amount of materials in the process if you go that route so um you know uh wither at your own risk you could also go deeper if you really wanted to and use like deep slate or deep slate tiles for a Shale but uh in this world in my archaeologist guide world I didn’t really have the resources to go much deeper and maintain sanity so uh so it’s up to you if you want to use that fair mind I felt like andesite worked pretty well for a Shale sub Institute next you’ll want to think about how these materials get turned into something that you can make bricks out of for fired bricks brick makers either use clay or they’ll grind stones like Shale into a really fine grained sand and then they’ll mix that with some water to form the type of clay that’s ideal for fired brick making and you may be wondering why not just use clay well firstly a lot of brick makers do just use clay they just they have access to Clay that’s good for Brick making and they’ll use that but r Bing shell down and then adding water gives brick makers a lot more control over how much water is in the clay that goes into their bricks which means that they have a lot more control and predictability over how long the drying process might take or the firing process and they can be a bit more sure about how uniform their bricks are from one day to the next in terms of materials so you could build something that will grind Shale down and maybe also some place for Shale to get hydrate or for clay to get kind of worked together so that it becomes a uniform clay I went with a basin made out of cut copper and then used some grindstones connected to a stone bricks wall structure just to look like some kind of grinding machine for the Shale for brick makers who are using clay instead of shale there might be a little less to build here but I would imagine that the brick makers might work the clay a bit just to make sure that it’s all the same throughout the entire batch of clay they might also add some sand or some other materials just to make the clay a little bit better for Brick making okay next choice where are you making the bricks where you get the materials for the bricks where you mix and hydrate those materials and where you shape and dry or fire your bricks might all be in the same place or it might be in a bunch of different places in the past Brick Works making fired bricks were often built next to the Clay Pit where they got their clay because then they wouldn’t have to transport the heavy clay terribly far to make the bricks but more recently The Brick Works have been built farther away from the clay pits partly because the company that mines the clay and the company that makes the bricks are often two different companies these days and also partly because many Brick Works sell their bricks to a wide customer base so being more centrally located or easily accessible to customers works better for them is your brick works next to your Clay Pit or your shell mine or is it maybe a little bit closer to a town or a city also is anything you’re building as part of the Brick Works made out of bricks it might be really cool to have a a few buildings in this brick works that are made using bricks that were made at this brick works on the other hand you might avoid using bricks like I did in this build because this is a new Brick Works in an area that doesn’t have easy access to Bricks they haven’t had time to build anything with the bricks that they’ve made because they haven’t made that many bricks yet what size brick are you making this isn’t going to affect things like molds in Minecraft because we don’t really have too many options there but it might affect the final block that you end up using believe it or not not all bricks are the same size not even the bricks that we get in Minecraft you can see there’s a big difference in size between like the regular bricks and the Nether Bricks and the and the red Nether Bricks versus the polished Blackstone bricks or the endstone bricks because bricks are usually used to make walls the standard brick size in each country actually depends at least a little bit on a good thickness of wall for the climate that the bricks are made in so here you can see that Russian bricks are larger than Dutch bricks and that’s partly because it is a lot colder in Russia than it is in the Netherlands and a thicker wall is better in Russia but as you can see in the brick item the dimensions of individual bricks are also relative to each other so that they can fit together properly so the length of a brick is usually two times the width of the brick plus enough space for some mortar so that you can lay the bricks perpendicular to the layer below as you build up the thickness of the brick is also half the the size of the width with a little room for Mortar again now here is something fun that I realized when making this video you see this block right here this lovely bricks block this is made with bricks that don’t match the ratios that I just told you about that’s right Minecraft’s bricks as the full block aren’t the correct proportion to fired bricks in real life and they’re also not even the correct proportion to the fired bricks as the item in in Minecraft in fact the fired bricks as the item is probably closer to the correct proportions than the brick block itself so here we have bricks that are 7 pixels long so half of that would be about 3 or four pixels for the width we don’t have the width but we can have it again to get the thickness which means that these blocks These Bricks should be only one to two pixels thick instead of three so actually These Bricks wouldn’t fit together like traditional bricks do if we work the math out the other way so instead of starting with the length we start with the thickness a brick that’s 3 pixels thick should be about six or seven pixels wide so it would be about this wide and then about 12 pixels long bricks in real life have a little bit of wiggle room between them but even with the wiggle room the minimum length for these bricks should be about 10 pixels not seven now before anybody goes and floods Minecraft’s inbox I’m assuming that they have the the proportion the way that they do because it looked better than the shorter bricks but now you know so you’re uh you’re never going to unsee it you’re welcome we don’t really have different sizes of bricks in Minecraft we really only have two types of bricks we have these bricks which are closer to fired brick size so we have regular fired bricks and then we have Nether Bricks and then we have red Nether Bricks and then we have the the sort of stone brick uh size options and actually hold on we have three different sizes I’m realizing so we have these with the stone bricks the Deep slate bricks the endstone bricks and the uh polished Blackstone bricks and then we have something that’s kind of in between with the quartz bricks here let me put this over here the quartz bricks and the mud bricks which I’m realizing are using a similar pattern to the quartz bricks so one of the things you might have to do is figure out what’s more important to you the color of your bricks or the size of your bricks and uh and you may have to make decisions based on whichever of those you care about more and then you could also use something like prismarine bricks which are called bricks but I’m not sure that they would count as bricks in real life and you have the cut copper blocks especially the oxidized and the weathered cut copper blocks and those could be different brick sizes for you as well if you if you like the color or you like the shape you could go with those two what color are your bricks the color of your brick in the real world is mostly going to depend on the materials that you use to make it and the reaction that those materials have to drying or firing fired bricks are often this reddish orange in color or orangey red brick color the color that you picture when you think of bricks and that’s because there’s small amounts of iron in the clay when the iron is fired in what’s called an oxidizing environment which basically just means a a kiln where there’s a decent amount of oxygen the iron oxidizes just like copper oxidizes in Minecraft the Iron Will oxidize into that rust color and it turns the bricks Ry red but you can also make fired bricks other colors if you either work in small amounts of other minerals into at least the surface of the brick or you cover them with a glaze or something else that would color them differently so white yellow Browns and Grays are pretty common brick colors in Minecraft we also have several color options for bricks although a lot of them only have one specific size so you might find that your color is already decided for you based on the size that you chose or you might realize that whatever color you’re choosing that kind of answers the question of what size of brick you’re making if you can’t get both the size of brick and the color of brick that you want it’s worth thinking about which one is more important to you the size of the brick or the color and then going with whichever one that is so endstone works really well for yellow or buff colors while stone bricks works really really well for or gray colors polished Blackstone bricks deep slate bricks or deep slate tiles are really good dark gray or black colors and quartz bricks are really good for like bright white bricks it’s a little bit unusual but you could use oxidized cut copper for a cyan or greenish brick if you wanted to and Nether Bricks are a really great deep red or purpley color or or like red Nether Bricks they’re just kind of a bright red color too you could also use the other cut copper blocks if you wax them but they do tend to have a little bit of a shine to them because they are intended to be copper so play around with it and see if it’s going to work for what you’re trying to do because fired bricks are fired in a kiln we also need to talk about how colors change in a kiln and we also need to talk about glazes so first let’s talk about the Kiln fired bricks can be different colors based on the environment of the Kiln that they’re fired in bricks are that typically orangey red color because they’re usually fired in what’s what called an oxidizing environment and what that means is that basically there’s a lot of air in the in the Kiln when the bricks are being fired there’s a lot of oxygen in the Kiln when the bricks are being fired in Minecraft copper will oxidize right so the longer it’s exposed to air the more it will turn this greenish color in the real world when iron is exposed to air it will also oxidize and that’s where rust comes from so when Clay is fired in a kiln that has lots of air flowing through it or as I said lots of oxygen which is why we call it oxidizing the iron that is in the clay will oxidize and turn the brick that orangey red color like rust that’s that’s where it’s coming from it’s from the iron that is oxidizing inside the clay but if the brick is fired in a kiln that has very little air flowing through it which is called a reducing environment so basically there’s almost no air in the Kiln so instead of turning red in a kiln where there’s very little oxygen the iron in the clay will actually turn the brick like a black or a very dark brown color so you can actually get different colors of bricks just by firing them with different amounts of oxygen in the kilm you can also get different colors of Bricks by covering the surface of the brick with glaze just like Potters might add glaze to their bowls or cups or their other Ceramics so glaze is a glassy covering that you add to the surface of ceramics that will color them basically any color that you want because glaze is glassy it also makes the surface of the brick really smooth although there are glazes that don’t make ceramic smooth and shiny they’re matte glazes and that’s that’s it’s also a whole thing bottom line is that you can use glazes to get a lot of different colors of brick so if you’re wanting to have a fired Brick Works that makes bright green bricks that is definitely possible you could 100% make that and it would be accurate to what’s possible in reality which brings us to the next next choice how are you shaping your bricks just as there are a few different materials for Brick making there are also a few different ways that you can shape the bricks the simplest way is by pressing the materials by hand into a wooden mold that is the shape and size that you want your bricks to be or at least the size you want them to be before they’re dried remember that there’s a lot of water in these bricks so when they’re dried or fired they’re going to shrink a little so you do need your molds to be a little bit bigger than the size that you want your final bricks to be but the easiest way to shape them is by pushing as much material into that mold as you can in the real world brick makers will coat these molds in sand or oil so that the clay doesn’t stick to them so you can use the mold over and over really easily so like I said you can press all of these things into the mold by hand and that’s the most common technique that we see in archaeology until the later 18th century and into the 19th century and in the early 19th century we see the the development of what is called a pug mill now pug Mills are machines that extrude or push clay through something called a Dye which is basically like a stencil sort of tool that shapes the clay to have the right width and thickness for the bricks that you’re trying to make brick makers push a lot of clay through these pugmills so that it forms this long cable of clay that’s the right width and thickness for the bricks and then they cut that cable to be the right length by pushing it through a wall of wires that way you end up with lots of bricks that are nearly identical sizes which is exactly what you want for a building material the earliest pug Mills actually only formed clay chunks that were the right amount of clay for a brick so the clay was basically pushed through the mill and cut with a series of knives and then gravity made the clay fall to the ground where workers would pick it up and bring it over to press it by hand into the wooden molds that I mentioned earlier but as the technology developed pug Mills ended up doing a lot more shaping of the bricks which meant that brick makers didn’t need a molding station at all anymore you can use pressure to mold fired bricks too so dry pressed bricks or often just called pressed bricks are bricks that are made by compressing nearly dry clay into the steel mold these types of bricks these dry pressed or pressed bricks they’re often a lot denser than fired bricks that are made from wet clay and they usually have cleaner edges because of the pressure that’s being used to push it into the mold but but they do take longer to Fire and they need a lot of force to compress the brick to the right density so they tend to be a lot more expensive to make this is honestly a bit difficult to show in Minecraft you could use like flower pots or maybe like wooden bowls in item frames or if you’re using mods where you can place something like a wooden bowl that works too but even these are kind of they’re not they’re not the greatest I ended up putting trap doors over over a a clay block and that I would say works pretty well in vanilla Minecraft you could also use unlit campfires this one kind of works but it worked less well than the the trap doors I feel like mostly because you can easily see that the clay is underneath it whereas these they look from from above at least they look a little bit more like clay has been packed into a mold you could maybe also do something with shulker boxes where like opening it up and then closing it there’s something about closing it that molds the clay into what you want it to be and that could be pretty cool you could also use cauldrons and use those as molds instead those unfortunately are the easier builds in Minecraft um this how how do we build a pug mill questions I never thought I’d ask myself but you know here we are I’m going to take out this row of stuff I know it’s a good build but um we’re going to we’re going to lose it we’re going to going to lose half of it we still have most to build over here okay so one of the issues with a pug mill is that it’s well it can be relatively small I don’t think we can easily do something small here in Minecraft so uh we’re going to we’re going to build something on the larger side we do need some kind of table where these things are being uh extruded to and then we could maybe do like a hopper and then if we do something with stairs maybe to form like a basin at the top we could also use a cauldron I wish we had like metal stairs I mean I guess we have copper stairs let’s do some waxed exposed copper stairs cut copper stairs like I had for the basins over here for mixing and such let’s do this okay I think we should have a trapo there that is then bringing I guess blocks of clay because we don’t really have anything that fits the mold necessarily what what am I here we go we can get rid of that so if we have a block of clay there and then we have another block of clay here and we kind of want maybe a hopper oops hold on let me let me use creative mode properly um if we do that there and then we get the stairs around the hopper so that they’re forming almost like a funnel into the funnel of the hopper so the downside is that it looks like this weird Square on top of a hopper just because the stair textures don’t really align so we could put stairs underneath but at that point why do we have the hopper right so we don’t maybe we take the hopper out and we put the stairs underneath now we could fill in the corners so that it looks more like a o actually I kind of like this I think hold on once I can walk around the whole thing okay that’s pretty good and then we take this out and if we have uh sorry that was just a block that was a placeholder for anyone who’s visually impaired and if I grab a trapo that is more solid like the spruce trap door we could also do a birch trap door although that looks a little flimsy to me I think we’re going to go with Spruce I think that works the best for now do we have like a slab I guess we could do one that matches the the copper so the exposed cut copper lab on the bottom yeah that kind of works the only downside to this is that I don’t know that we have an easy place for a lever but I guess we could put one up at the top do I want stairs or do I want a ladder I feel like stairs are a bit more solid okay and then if we put a lever on this corner here here’s the window or we could put it on that side but I feel like you want to be able to see if the lever is on or off that works you know I was not expecting that to be as relatively straightforward as it was but I think we’ve built a pug mill it’s a really big pug mill but uh but it’s a pugmill the next choice is are you going to frog the bricks this is going to be difficult to show on the bricks in Minecraft but bricks in real life often aren’t completely solid they usually have an indentation on one side which is called a frog the frog makes the bricks lighter and saves on material but it also gives a really good spot for a full layer of mortar to fit between Brick Layers here in the UK bricks are always laid with the Frog facing up so the same amount of mortar gets spread between each layer and so that mortar doesn’t fall out when tipping the brick upside down frogs in bricks also became a really good place to stamp the manufacturer’s name onto the brick that they were making branding is important especially if you’ve got multiple Brick Works in the same area if your bricks are good quality then you you want Masons or construction teams to know what brand it is so that they can come back to buy bricks from your company instead of someone else’s archaeologically when we find bricks that have been used in like a building or something we can usually tell if there have been changes to the building or maybe certain areas where they’re like patched a wall or something because we find bricks made from multiple different companies maybe one company went out of business between when the building was built and when the patch was needed or maybe somebody else bought the building and had their own preferred brand of brick maker to use so how do we show frogging in Minecraft I am going to be honest I really am not sure this is going to be I mean you can’t show it on the the blocks themselves so automatically this is going to be something that’s more like a station than anything else I suppose you could use a button or like a a pressure plate a pressure plate is maybe too big so let’s see we have a pressure plate that’s a little too big the button is probably a little too small the flower pot now okay all right we might be cooking here this might this might work out okay we’re going to add some more clay to the table we’re going to put a flower pot on top of the clay and I’m wondering if we can show something that pushes The Clay Pot down into the brick if we do a piston here let’s get a chain because we can’t just have a piston hanging out in midair and then if we do a lever okay so we have the staircase by the window what if we then take some slabs like polished andesite and make it kind of a platform and if I put the lever on this side okay they go up they have access to this lever and they have access to this lever I need to I need to put I health and safety is important let’s do some warped trap doors on the outside of where they would walk so long as it looks like that is a station that is happening that’s all that matters or you could do this for frogging the bricks get it it’s a frog on the on the on the bricks it seriously the amount of self-control that this took to not make this joke from the very beginning next choice how are you drying your bricks for fired bricks if you’re using something like a Hoffman Kiln or a bulls trench Kiln to fire your bricks which I will get to in the next choice then you don’t need to worry about a separate area for drying the bricks because they’re going to dry in the Kiln as part of the firing process but if you want a smaller Kil that you just use for firing the bricks you’re going to need to dry your bricks for 20 to 40 hours at 50 to 150° C or 120 to 300 de F so you could build a larger oven sort of room that can dry These Bricks out with a slower and lower heat than the firing Kil that you end up building Choice number 11 how are you firing your bricks so let’s get into this firing technique because there are a few different ways that you can fire fired bricks and oh my goodness are they interesting so uh so buckle up everybody we’re going on a on a brick Kil Extravaganza tour so the first option is using what’s called a brick clamp if you’ve seen my coal and charcoal video in my archaeologist Guide Series you’ll know that these charcoal piles are often called charcoal clamps well a brick clamp is very similar to a charcoal clamp bricks are assembled and stacked around multiple piles of wood or charcoal leaving holes so that the air can flow around the bricks once the pile is complete just light the fire and keep it going and you’re good to go when these are just just made out of bricks so like you’re literally just you stack all the bricks and those are the things that fire that’s when they’re called a brick clamp but you can also turn your brick clamp into what’s called a scove Kil by packing Earth or mud around it like we did with the charcoal clamps brick clamps and scove kils are really helpful because they don’t need a lot of materials they’re mostly made out of the bricks that you’re trying to fire but there are a few drawbacks first the bricks that are closest to the bottom are close to the fire and so they end up getting overfired or overb burned and bricks on the top layers don’t get enough heat because they’re too far away from the fire so only the bricks in the middle are what are called First Class bricks so if you’re able to make a proper Kiln it’s worth doing that to save over burning or under burning like half of your bricks there are two main styles of Kil for fired bricks at least at the Industrial Level there’s the Hoffman Kiln and the Bulls Trench Kil the Hoffman Kiln was first patented in 1858 in Austria by Friedrich Hoffman and he eventually patented it in many countries in the years and decades afterwards the Hoffman Kiln is a building that is either circular or elliptical the original design was circular but basically it became elliptical really quickly um or even rectangular depending on on where it was and it’s often about 15 M or 50 ft wide and about 60 to 150 M or 200 to 500 ft long these are Big Buildings they’re often made out of bricks themselves but I’m just going to make mine out of andesite just so that it contrasts a bit better with the bricks inside and you can see how the bricks are being made I’m also going to build a kiln on the smaller side just because I have recently built 11 Egyptian Pyramids I am aware of how big 150 m 150 block wide buildings are and uh I don’t need a building here that’s 150 blocks wide Hoffman kills have chambers that sit side by side all around them the Kiln each room is connected to the one next to it by openings or holes that allow warm air from that room to flow into the one next to it and each room has a pallet of bricks at different stages of drying or firing not with not different stages within the same room each room is at a different stage in a Hoffman Kiln there’s a fire that gets lit in a specific chamber to start the Kil but once the Fire gets going properly and bricks are loaded into the chambers the fire then moves from chamber to chamber temporary barriers like iron sheets are fitted between sections from the top of the Kil so that they can close off one Chamber from another the fire in the Kil actually Burns continuously and when I say continuously I mean like it never goes out there are some fires in Iran that have been burning for 35 years straight while the bricks in one room fire the residual heat from the firing room moves through the openings between the chambers into the room next door and dries the bricks in that room so that they can be fired next so the fire is simultaneously firing the bricks in the room it’s in and drying the bricks in the room it’s going to next the fire moves around the entire building through opening and closing dampers and flu and also by moving through something called Trace holes which are holes in the lower part of the chamber walls or stacks of bricks that are generally stuffed with paper initially and then the paper burns as the Fire gets closer so that the fire can pass through to the next chamber how cool is that and then Chambers where it’s open and new bricks are being laid those chambers draw cold air in from the outside to cool the bricks down once the chamber has properly cooled and the fire has moved towards the other side of the Kiln the brick makers can open the Wicket or the outside door to the room pull out the fired bricks and load in more unfired bricks to get get fired when the fire comes back around seriously I still can’t get over how cool this is so that’s the Hoffman Kiln but what’s a bull’s trench Kiln the Bulls trench Kiln was designed by W bull in the late 19th century so around the same time that Hoffman was making his Kiln the Bull’s trench Kiln can also be circular or elliptical and it also has Chambers where bricks are stacked and then the fire also moves continuously around the Kiln but there are are a few big differences between the Hoffman Kiln and the Bulls trench Kiln first the Bulls trench Kiln is called a trench Kil because it’s actually underground it is dug into the ground it’s a trench for a trench Kil it get it the general dimensions are about 6 to 9 M or 20 to 30 ft wide about 2 to 2 and 1/2 M or 6 and 1/2 to 8 ft deep and about 100 to 150 m are roughly 300 to 500 ft long so basically as long as a lot of pyramids are wide we’re back to the mega builds Guys these two kils they’re so big also technically you can build a bulls trench Kil above ground but the original design was for a trench underground or like dug into the ground with the roof sticking up the other main difference with the Bull’s trench Kiln is that the chimney can actually move around the building and so can the roof you can just move it to wherever the fire is in a Hoffman Kil the chimney is stationary it doesn’t go walking about with the fire in a bulls trench Kil the chimney moves with the fire so the roof of a bull’s trench Kil is usually made out of something like tin or some other kind of metal so that it can be moved easier and you can place the chimney as I said pretty much anywhere in the kilm that you want depending on where the fire is the downside is that you do need to support the chimney with wires so that it doesn’t just topple over because it’s not it’s not a terribly stable thing when it’s portable and it also does mean that the roof is often a little bit flimsier because you need to be able to move the roof as well also also because the chimneys need to be light enough to move they’re often a little bit too short for the Bulls trench Kiln to maximize its heat efficiency so basically they use shorter chimneys so that they can move the chimney around but that means that more heat from the Kiln gets lost in the firing process instead of being used to dry and fire more bricks but the Bull’s trench Kiln Works largely the same as a Hoffman Kil and it can hold between 200,000 to 300,000 bricks at a time which is enormous and the same is true for the Hoffman Kil they can they can hold a lot of bricks and the next thing to think about with fired bricks is what kind of fuel you’re using to fire your bricks so most of the firing techniques that I’ve talked about like the brick clamp and the scove Kiln and the Hoffman Kil that we’ve got up there and the Bulls trench Kil they tend to use either wood or charcoal as their fuel but a Hoffman Kiln or a bulls trench Kil can also use gasoline or coal or natural gas or pretty much any other type of fuel so long as it can reach temperatures between 600 and 1200° cus or 1500 to 2000° F so instead of wood or charcoal you could instead use maybe like a block of coal or some campfires like I have up there or if you want to get a bit minecrafty with it you could use a kelp block or a bucket of lava or a blaze rod you have a lot of options here and that’s it we’ve gone through all of the choices that are specific to fired bricks next episode we’re going to talk about concrete bricks so if you’d like to get notified when that episode drops next week subscribe to the channel and hit the notification Bell if you missed episode one of this miniseries check out this video over here or if you would like to see me building a brick works in a survival world check out this video in my archaeologist guide to Minecraft series right over here that’s all for me for today thank you all for tuning in and I hope you have a great rest of your day bye