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[gaclay-l] killer cracks...

updated sun 3 aug 03

 

Bill Buckner on fri 1 aug 03


Hi, Tim,

Good to see you guys at the opening at MudFire tonight. Thanks for the
cracking feedback. As much as I hate for it to be true, I believe you have
hit upon the source of the problem. But, I think it has more to do with
the amount of particle saturation than anything else. The relatively high
proportion of dry mix to slip seems to me to perhaps be the true culprit. I
believe mixing the entire batch as slip then drying it to the proper
consistency would fix the problem (this is how I mix test batches - mix to
slip then dry the slip to clay in a plaster trough). However, I do not
have the facilities to do such on a large enough scale to sustain my need
for clay. Well, the approach I have been using was worth a shot. I may
have to throw in the towel and return to a commercial blend. At least the
pugger alleviates the need to have any scrap to reclaim and virtually
reduces the need to wedge to zero.

Cheers,
-Bill

At 11:46 AM 8/1/2003 -0400, you wrote:
>Bill -
>I envy you the Peter Pugger, but I wouldn't feel comfortable using the dry
>mixed ingredients. It seems to me that the likelihood that any amount of
>the dry mix that you added (less than 100% obviously) would not be in
>exactly the same proportions as the original recipe. This has come up in
>a discussion I had recently where someone wanted to mix a glaze up dry
>using 4 ingredients 50 lbs each, and then just taking enough out of the
>dry mix to make a batch. I don't believe that such approaches could
>really be viable. You might try mixing a small batch of dry ingredients
>and adding the total batch to your slip and see if the cracking
>disappears. By the way, any chance that your slip is settling out at all?
>
>Good Luck
>Tim Sullivan

billBUCKNER
www.sodaglaze.com

Life is too important to be taken seriously.
-Oscar Wilde