Yesterday we fired the Stanford kazegama again and tried a new method of introducing the ash.  Previously we fed the ash into the intake of our large combustion blower, following Steve’s original method, and this worked well except that many pots ended up with unfortunate clods of unmelted ash.  In the above photo you can see a metal sealed can with a red rubber hose and larger diameter steel-mesh hose attached to the lid (the upside-down white plastic bucket isn’t doing anything).  We put ash into the metal can, blow compressed air in through the red hose, and allow a well-dispersed stream of ash to enter the burner through the metal hose.  The can is loaded only half-full with ash, and we didn’t screen the ash ahead of time.  Some shaking of the can is necessary but the ash goes in gradually (we put in about a gallon over the course of about two hours) and without clods.  Larger pieces of “sintered ash” get left in the bottom of the can, and probably help stir up the finer ash when shakin.  You could do the same thing with any sealed container with bulkhead connectors.  The can we use has 1/4″ NPT fittings.