Bedford Museum

Making Bricks

The process of making bricks can be divided into a number of stages. Each stage will be looked at in turn.

Extracting
the clay

Treating
the clay

Making
the bricks

Distributing
the bricks

Making the Bricks

The early brick presses only applied two presses to the powdered clay in the brick moulds. This was eventually increased to four to produce better quality bricks. This led to the trade name Phorpres. Although bricks are a uniform size, brick moulds vary because different clays shrink by different amounts when fired. By the mid-1890s the brick moulds were heated to prevent the clay sticking to them.

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	Piano wire screens, March 1949
	Brick Press
The newly moulded but unfired bricks are called green bricks. Some of these green bricks have decorative facings put on them. All the green bricks are then stacked in the kiln for firing, which takes about 10 days.
	Phorpres logo
The carbon in the clay provides a lot of the fuel used for firing. This reduces the cost of making the bricks. Fine coal, called smudge is added as a fuel to control the temperature. Smudge was added through small holes in the top of the kiln. The smudge was initially carried to the top of the kiln by an aerial haulage system. The kilns work continuously. Each kiln is a series of chambers, the fire travels around the chambers and is never extinguished. While some chambers are firing others are being set with bricks and some are cooling. The bricks fire at 1050^oC then the temperature is eased to 900^oC by the addition of cold air. Cooling bricks warm the air entering the kiln, hot waste gases dry the newly set green bricks.
	A kiln being loaded with green bricks
	Inflatable rubbers on the forklifts blades allows it to grip the bricks easily
	Fired bricks being drawn (left) and green bricks being loaded (right). Fired bricks are lighter because they contain less water, this allows the forklift to carry more of them.
	Smudge being loaded onto the kiln roof the modern way
	Feeding smudge into the kiln through feedholes. Each feedhole has a pot lid
Even after cooling, the fired bricks were still hot as they were unloaded from the kilns. The workers used to make pads from old car tyres to protect their hands from the heat. Barrows like the one below were used to transport the bricks. Now forklift trucks are used. This makes the work much faster.
	One of the barrows used for moving bricks
	Raffaele Preziosa unloading finished bricks from kiln in 1952

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