Curing The Lid

After getting the refractory into the lid it still needs to be cured. Gingery's book calls for a pattern of temperatures and time to be completed in an oven. The lid I built, with the handles as I built them, wouldn't even come close to fitting in my oven, plus my wife wouldn't have liked me doing that anyway, so I just built a fire in my fire pit and cure the lid slowly that way.

I started with a small fire and stood the lid on it's side along an edge of the fire pit. After a bit of steam had stopped coming from the first side I turned the lid around to expose the other side to the low heat and after that, I built the fire up and tried to put as much heat as I could into the lid. It seemed to work, notice the crack running from the bottom of the lid towards the center. It actually shows up well in the photo, it was actually a very small crack, which I filled in later with a bit of refractory that I thinned out a bit to get it into the crack better.

I finished the off by covering it with the coals and letting the lid cool slowly as the fire and coals burnt out.