What is the Glaze Dragon?
Section: Glazes, Subsection: Introduction
Description
At Digitalfire we use a Dragon to personify the kinds of thinking that prevent potters, educators and technicians from understanding and therefore controlling their glazes.
Article
It is the attitudes that counter your desire and efforts to control your glazes.
Defending the Status Quo
Change is needed but the dragon wants the status quo.
- The 'textbook glaze and body culture' continues to dominate among potters and small manufacturers; it pursues a 'universal', 'foolproof' recipe that exists only in dreamland. The 'recipe trade' fosters a helplessness that neither 'understands' or controls recipes, that is a slave of fifty recipes that don't work instead of being a master of one or two that do.
- Industry is still driven by a 'salesman model' where companies use recipes and materials recommend by salesman and move toward less in-house expertise toward more dependence on suppliers and consultants.
Roulette Wheel Approach
- Pottery students are still taught to spin the 'roulette wheel' of glaze tests in the blind hope that one will not only look great but also have good application properties, reliability, hardness and durability, resistance to leaching and staining, fit, adjustability, etc. This spawns generations of students who discover hundreds of recipes that don't travel well and who lack skills to recognize or create ones that do.
- Manufacturers often lack knowledge about alternate formulations and material brands and gamble that what they have is optimized to their process. They spend millions on equipment but overlook the materials.
Apathy Toward Important Issues
The dragon promotes casual attitudes and lack-of-conscience regarding ware durability, functionality, and safety even though modern methods, materials, equipment, and information afford great control. He wants you to think you are exempt from technical concerns, that you will never be held accountable for deficient surfaces that hurt the reputation of the pottery and ceramic industry.
 Getting kicked around The dragon wants to make sure you learn nothing when recipes don't work. When you 'spin your wheels' and waste years on blind alleys and dead ends he wants you to blame yourself or your consultant rather than the prevailing culture.
Oversimplification
The dragon supplies 'blinders' so that you need not concern yourself with technical issues or have in-house expertise. He advocates abdication of control to suppliers and consultants, that you sacrifice only to the god of form and surface. He promises there will be no day-of-reckoning for this attitude.
Naked Undocumented Recipes, Materials
- The dragon encourages authors not to 'dress' recipes for 'travel' by supplying information (i.e. special mechanisms, why each material is used, how to adjust for expansion, surface, temperature, special firing or application techniques, etc.). He then match-makes doomed 'affairs' between ceramists and these 'naked' recipes leaving many disillusioned and ill-equipped to recognize true glaze quality. Traveling glaze recipes that have amnesia about who they are, why they are, where they've been move on and leave alienated people stuck with storage rooms full of mystery materials as reminders of the broken promises.
- The dragon encourages material suppliers to provide data sheets full of numbers that don't apply to typical ceramic applications and supply little or no information on exactly what the material is, its strengths and weaknesses compared to others, and rationale behind its use in bodies or glazes. Users constantly feel that there are other better suited materials out there but the prevailing 'don't-need-to-know' culture of material ignorance keeps them in obscurity.
Out Bound Links
In Bound Links
- (Articles)
Glaze Recipes: Formulate Your Own Instead The only way you will ever get the glaze you really need is to formulate your own. The longer you st... - (Articles)
G1214M Cone 5-7 20x5 Glossy Base Glaze This is a base transparent glaze recipe developed for cone 6. It is known as the 20x5 or 20 by 5 rec... - (Project)
Glaze and Clay Body Recipes
The industrial ceramic world generally revolves ar... - (Project)
Troubleshooting Ceramic Process Problems and Links
It important to be in control of your process and ... - (Articles)
G1947U/G2571A Cone 10/10R Base Matte/Glossy Glazes These starting recipes use no frits and work in oxidation/reduction and are inexpensive to make. The...
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The future of ceramic recipe, material and physical testing record keeping is here.
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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Watch the video or sign-up at http://insight-live.com.