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Glaze Recipes: Formulate Your Own Instead

Section: Glazes, Subsection: Introduction

Description

The only way you will ever get the glaze you really need is to formulate your own. The longer you stay on the glaze recipe treadmill the more time you waste.

Article

The traffic in glaze recipes has had a net negative effect on functional ceramics in education, hobby, and industry. Books and the internet are filled with recipes that are illogical and emphasize appearance at the expense of safety, practicality, or cost. 'Affairs' with these 'naked' (undocumented) recipes have left many numbed regarding their accountability and even ill equipped to recognize true quality. This trade in recipes is fostering a culture that runs counter to the idea of 'understanding' and controlling our materials and recipes, it breeds ignorance of oxide and material sciences and the true nature of the ceramic process. It deludes many into an 'easy-fix' mentality that seeks 'foolproof' solutions that end up being blind allies that waste years and teach nothing. Implied 'ethics' suggest that the traffic in recipes be accompanied by documentation to prove givers conscientious and by critical analysis and testing on the part of recipients willing to 'understand' and adjust. Weak, leachable, difficult-to-clean, crazed, shivered, leaching glazes hurt the reputation of the pottery and ceramic industry. It is time that a 'want-to-know-why' mindset toward formulating and adjusting glazes on the oxide and material level is fostered in students. It is time that a stigma is attached to joining the 'illicit trade' in recipes and using trial-and-error bull-in-a-china-shop approaches to glaze formulation.

We recommend a 'base glaze with variations' starting model. As your understanding of a base glaze improves over a period of years you can develop the ability to identify its mechanism and learn to transplant them into different bases. In this way you can minimize the number of base recipes you use. In addition, as you improve each base (e.g. its application properties, fired harness, fit adjustability, etc) all the variations based on it will inherit the improvements.

In education and pottery circles the trade in recipes has encouraged a 'roulette wheel' approach to choosing glazes and in big industry there is a brain-drain toward suppliers and consultants while many manufacturers are becoming more and more helpless. At Digitalfire Corporation we personify these dangerous trends and attitudes as 'The Dragon'. The dragon wants you to believe that casual potters are exempt from technical concerns. He fosters blissful attitudes that keep us on an endless treadmill of glaze recipe experimentation and disappointment or on suppliers that lack a connection to unique circumstances and customer specific problems. The dragon wants us to think that glaze chemistry is too complicated and too much trouble.

The Formula Viewpoint, Key to Taking Control

Chemistry, that is, viewing your glazes as formulas of oxides rather than recipes of materials, is an invaluable tool to deal with things like hardness, strength, porosity, leaching, thermal shock resistance, chip resistance, glaze fit, color compatibility, of your functional ware. A typical formula contains eight or so oxides and it takes a lot less study to figure out what these contribute than it does to figure out what 100 different materials do. Glaze software, like INSIGHT, provides the simplest way to work with glaze formulas.

Out Bound Links

In Bound Links

  • (Project) Glaze and Clay Body Recipes

    The industrial ceramic world generally revolves ar...
The future of ceramic recipe, material and physical testing record keeping is here.
Watch the video or sign-up at http://insight-live.com.

Maintain your recipe database on-line

  • Login to a private account or work with others in a group account (e.g. university).
  • Nothing to install (access it using your web browser). It is always the latest version.
  • Easy to import your existing data.
  • As many side-by-side recipes as you want.
  • Many ways to search and classify glaze and body recipes.
  • Glaze and body recipes are robust, with units-of-measure, unlimited pictures with individual titles and descriptions.
  • Add variations to a recipe; each with its own pictures, descriptions and name/code-number extensions.
  • Recipes can link to typecodes, projects and firing schedules (all managed in their own areas).
  • Standard reports and mix ticket reports with last-minute-totalling; variations report as if they are a complete recipe.
  • Video tutorials, help system, contact form on every page, dedicated messaging and support ticket systems.
  • It is an industrial-strength database system (unlimited capacity, fast, reliable, scalable).

Imports many file formats

  • Glaze recipe formats supported: HyperGlaze, GlazeGhem, GlazeMaster, Matrix, INSIGHT XML recipes (single and multiple), INSIGHT SQLite DB files.
  • Assign a batch number to imports, and later search by batch.
  • Assign multiple typecodes to imported glaze and body batches (to classify) and search on these later.
  • Prepend character sequences to glaze recipe names during import.
  • Import the pictures and pair them to their corresponding records automatically.
  • One click to automatically export the database to an SQLite DB database file and download it (for use with desktop INSIGHT or just as a backup).
  • Export and import individual glaze recipes as text or XML.

Perfect for Education

  • Ceramic study programs can now accumulate material, recipe and testing data year-after-year, students can login and together build a valuable ceramic glaze and body knowledge resource.
  • Students already have internet connected devices, computers are not even needed in the class.
  • The Reference Manager gives you quick access to the Digitalfire Ceramic Reference Database.
Learn more..


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