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1
 PREPARATIONS
INTRODUCTION
After five years of development with
hundreds of students around Australia
and elsewhere, this course has now
reached an interesting stage. lt is still pre-
sentad as a course on high temperatura
glazes, but the 'baseline grid' approach
used here can be applied to glazes for any
temperatura, and the volumetric blending
technique enables larga numbers of
relatad test glazes to be preparad with a
mnimum of time and expense. Also the
use of 'assessment tiles' allows 35 glaze
samples to be handled as easily as one;
and they allow hundreds of glaze samples
to easily be fired in virtually identical con-
ditions, enabling comparisons to be made
in the knowledge that observad differ-
ences are not due to differences in firing.
The volumetric blending process, produc-
ing many related glazes by careful blend-
ing of four extremes, by its very nature
allows easy computar data processing to
produce recipes for all the glazes by
inputting the recipes of the four extremes.
Using this technique, the recipes and
oxide weight % figures for all the glazes
used in the course have been worked out
on computar and presentad here along
with Seger formulae. In fact, the computar
has eliminated the need for doing calcu-
lations in most of this course, but the cal-.
culations techniques are nevertheless
explained for anyone wishing to break
new ground.
This is meant to be a practica! course
with just enough theory to enable you to
produce the fired results; the ultimate
teaching a id here is not this book but the
flred sets of relatad glazes it helps you
produce. Those people actually doing the
experiments will get much more out of
this book than those who use it to guide
them in stabbing for desired effects with
spot tests. But if spot tests are all you
have time for, the 'Results Charts' and the
2
'Comments on Results' will give useful
guidance.
lf you want to get the most out of this
course, sorne work is required. The
kernel of Part 1, the sets of base glazes,
will take one person working carefully and
efficiently about forty hours -- about five
hours per set - to the stage where five to
ten 'assessment tiles' of each set are
ready to go into the kiln. lt takes much
less time if done with a group. Part 11
might take a week ora lifetime, depending
on how deep you want to go.
GROUP STUDY
The original version of this course was
run in Brlsbane at the Queensland Pot-
ters' Association, and this experience
showed quite clearly that the group study
approach has much to recommend it.
Sorne of the advantages are:
1. You can divide the workload with dif-
ferent people doing different exper-
iments or different parts of the same
experiment, making sure that quan-
tities are sufficient so that all students
can get samples of all the test
glazes.
2. With severa! people firing samples of
the same sets of glazes in different
kilns, one will get a better appreciation
of the effects of different firing cycles,
temperaturas, kiln atmospheres, rates
of cooling etc.
3. By arranging a fixed time for the group
to meet each week, you will find it
easier to get down and do the work,
than if you rely on doing it yourself
'when 1 have the spare time'.
4. In a group, you will find that different
people have differerit skills. lf you
intend working through the chapter on
calculations, sorne will find it easy to
understand and be able to explain it to
others.
REFERENCE BOOKS
Those of you already well used to glazing
and firing your own pots will probably not
need much extra reading apart from this
book. For beginners, 1will often be refer-
ring to standard texts that cover the real
fundamentals, such as how to mix your
glaze and apply it to the pot etc. 1 have
avoided trying to make this book all-
encompassing: the assumption is that
readers own or can get access to other
excellent texts that cover the basics.
Students doing the AFAS correspon-
dence course are recommended to get
Glazes for the Craft Potter by Harry Fraser
(Pitman) as a reference for beginners,
and Frank Hamer's Potter's Dctonary of
Materals and Technques
(Watson-Guptill) is recommended as an
excellent general reference. Other
classics by Leach, Cardew and Parmelee
are referred to regularly in the text. In Part
11 , Those Ce/adon 8/ues by Robert
Tichane (available from him, cfo New
York State lnstitute for Glaze Research,
511 N. Hamilton Street, Painted Post,
New York 14870, USA) and also Oriental
Glazes by Nigel Wood (Pitman) are rec-
ommended in the study of oriental
glazes.
BASIC GLAZE THEORY ANO
PRACTICE
As you probably know already, most
glazes contain fluxes, alumina and silica.
A glaze of this sort is callad a 'base glaze'
and may be used by itself as a glaze, or it
may be altered by adding colouring
oxides, andfor opacifiers. In Part 1of this
course we will be examining a large range
of base glazes - eight sets in all - each
set choosing a different set o f fluxes, and
varying alumina and silica over a large
range.
At this stage, if you feel a little lost by
terms such as fluxes, a/umina and si/lea,
then 1 recommend a crash course on
glaze elements -- either the first tour
chapters of Fraser's book or r'ference to
Hamer's dictionary mentioned above,
should help. But in a nutshell: the silica is
what makes the 'glass' in the glaze (it is
nature's commonest glass formar); the
fluxes make the silica melt at a reason-
able temperatura (by itself, slica melts at
1713C while we are working around
1280C); and the alumina is the 'stiffener'
that makes the glaze viscous so that it
does not run off the pot like water as soon
as it melts.
For the eight sets of glazes, we will use
fairly pure ingredients so that the effects
we want to observe are not masked by
impurities in the glaze or clay. Base
glazes are theoretically free of colouring
oxides, but a fairly common impurity in
clay is iron oxide that can imparta definite
colour toa glaze, even when present only
in the clay body in quite small quantities.
In choosing the clay body to receive the
glazes and in choosing the China clay
(kaolin) for use as a glaze ingredient, we
will select clays as low as possible in iron
oxide.
You must not think, however, that
'purity' equals 'quality'. Often the reversa
is the case. Purity aids understanding by
removing some of the unforeseeable vari-
ables. Your pure matarais will better
show the influence of the variables you
have chosen to examine; and once you
understand how these variables work,
you can then apply these principies to
less pure materials with understanding.
Once the experiments have been done, 1
will actually recommend that less pure
materials (less expensive and more
readily available) are used to produce
equivalents or derivativas of the exper-
imental glazes for general use in your pot-
tery workshop.
For those new to pottery who have not
had much experience at actually getting a
glaze onto a pot, 1 recommend you read
Chapters 14 and 15 in Fraser's book. But
here are the basic points:
1. Care should be taken with powdered
glaze materials. Barium carbonate is
poisonous, and sorne matarais are
dangerous if inhalad, especially
silca.
2. You need a set of scales that will weigh
fairly accurately up to abo\.Jt a
kilogram. lf it measures to a tenth of a
gram, that should be as accurate as
you need for most applications. lf you
are using cheap scales, you should get
them testad by putting sorne accurate
weights on the pan.
3. We will not be using a hydrometer or
glaze binders or electrolytes as men-
tioned in Fraser (Chapter 14) but will
use clay (usually kaolin) as a sus-
pender wherever this is acceptable by
the glaze formula.
4. The main methods of glaze application
will be by syringe and by dipping.
5. You wlll need to get the feel for what is
adequate thickness for glaze appl-
cation. We will be using variations in
thickness to learn as much as possiole
from each tile. More on that later.