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downfire/wood/story

updated sun 14 may 06

 

mel jacobson on fri 12 may 06


tony, i will not be frightened.

in fact, i have been using scrap wood in my gas kiln
for almost thirty years. on the way down.
i do not know if it really works, but i do it because
i want to. downfiring hank method is much more serious.
and, at least two hours. with gas.

we need all the help we can get for our new
`flatagama` donovan palmquist kiln at the farm.
it is wonderful...but we sure do not have all the answers.

we have been dorking with wood for about 6 years.
the mini train is gone...and a real kiln is in its place.

we just have sort out.
`who the hell is in charge`.
and it sure is not a newby kid.

nils is coming this summer, but you know how
wishy washy he can be.
and kurt is having all sorts of surgery..hands and
shoulder...( a card or email from his clayart friends
would be nice.) he is hurting a great deal.
and i just sit in a pink lawn chair and take naps.

guess we will have to hire karen terpstra. let her kick some butt.
mary bourner is all tied up with family...now she is a
grandma, gray haired and serious...so she is out. and what
is marta worth? now that she has changed her name.
marta maytree. m and m girl. she will just parade around and
make those damn bud vases that look like small boulders.

so, downfiring with sticks is great advice, we will do it.
of course, you may want to ask sheila if she wants to come
to hay creek and fire our kiln. leave you home to tend to
customers.

so, i signed up today for DSL high speed internet.
my training wheels are gone for good.
i will be melpots@visi.com /a good local company.
i will keep the dial up for at least another couple of weeks.
have to shift over the website and lose my place on google.
but, who cares. you will all be able to find me.
all my stationary will be mute, and cards..but, who cares.
i will rubber stamp the back, redneck style.
if you all get a big email with a twenty page header, you
will know i have switched over.
happy mother's day to great mothers all over the world.
mel


from: mel/minnetonka.mn.usa
website: http://my.pclink.com/~melpots3

Kathy Forer on fri 12 may 06


On May 12, 2006, at 5:04 PM, mel jacobson wrote:

> so, i signed up today for DSL high speed internet.
> my training wheels are gone for good.
> i will be melpots@visi.com /a good local company.
> i will keep the dial up for at least another couple of weeks.
> have to shift over the website and lose my place on google.

Welcome to the mid-speed world!
(the rest of the world is flying into high speed while we in the US
here are lurching into mid-range, but that's another discussion
entirely)

Mel, It's not necessary to "lose" your place on google, unless you
want to!

If you were previously getting hosting from pclink/core.com on their
Unix (or Linux) servers, all you need to do is leave your site there
for about a month and put in a "redirect" .htaccess file and send it
to your new address.

If your site was on windows servers, all bets are off. You need fancy
dancing and knowledgeable techs and very sophisticated web control
panels to get around NT/iis's inherently stodgy limitations.* Unix
redirect cuts through all the crap, http://www.freewebmasterhelp.com/
tutorials/htaccess

Better yet, use a domain name and your site will be portable.

> but, who cares. you will all be able to find me.
> all my stationary will be mute, and cards..but, who cares.
> i will rubber stamp the back, redneck style.

Make life simple for yourself, get a driver for your pickup. Get a
domain name for less than the cost of your rubber stamp. Check out
godaddy.com or dotster.com. KISS for the price of a good lunch. Get
your hosting for free with your dsl provider but do URL forwarding
with your domain registrar http://www.dotster.com/domains/
domaintools_urlfwd.php .

> if you all get a big email with a twenty page header, you
> will know i have switched over.

otoh, there's something very quaint and even charming about a non-
domain web site. Shows off Luddite tendencies to both advantage and
distraction. It's more personal and yet self-limiting, saying, I will
keep this small and web 1.0, I will not be 'commercial'.

"popular culture is everything that an academic approach is not:
irreverent, unconscious, unthinking, irrational, inexplicable, and
completely without the desire or much less the capacity to justify
its behaviour or motivations" http://www.bo-astrup.dk/complexity.html

A few years ago someone told me a designer or developer of some sort
was charging a non-profit group over $250 a year to register their
domain name, /register/ not host or develop or anything else. Shame!
It's a small sawbuck or slightly more.

Kathy Forer
http://www.foreverink.com
I just got my DBA today so I can accept checks for my Macintosh
consulting business and my clients don't have to worry that they'll
be nabbed by the IRS for not paying a freelancer's taxes as I'll be
doing them now. Oh, What have I done! Well, it's all better than what
I had been doing earlier for modelmaking when a client would say,
"eew, the fingers are crooked," or "the nose isn't long enough." I
prefer freedom from meddling. There are many paths to making clay,
not all of them lead to or through a business. I thought I had
avoided business and here I am DBA. Ha!

* 75% of web hosting servers run a variant of unix, generally easier
and cheaper (faster, better, etc.) than NT/IIS hosting http://
news.netcraft.com/archives/2006/04/06/april_2006_web_server_survey.html

clennell on fri 12 may 06


Sour Cherry Pottery

> tony, i will not be frightened.
>
> in fact, i have been using scrap wood in my gas kiln
> for almost thirty years. on the way down.
> i do not know if it really works, but i do it because
> i want to. downfiring hank method is much more serious.
> and, at least two hours. with gas.
>
> we need all the help we can get for our new
> `flatagama` donovan palmquist kiln at the farm.
> it is wonderful...but we sure do not have all the answers.
>
> we have been dorking with wood for about 6 years.
> the mini train is gone...and a real kiln is in its place.


Dear Mel: I've worked hard at what Taylor calls self promotion , I'm tired,
overworked, but I smell smoke. We'd both luv to help you do a melt down in
that new wood kiln. I ain't got much experience with flatagamas but I've got
28 years of wood fire under my belt. Give us a date! I have two shows in
July- one in toronto and one in The Hamptons. I know more self promo but
it's how I make a living by not working in a library.
I'll talk over the dates with my bride and maybeeeeeeee we'll come and try
to burn down the Flatagama. I'd do it just to see One Eyed Jack open the
other eye.
Post me a date so I can do some figurin'. I love smoke, good company and hot
kilns. no promises, but I'll do my best. Any 70 year old that can dream up
cardbard bats in a pinch and travel China is worth my effort.
Cheers,
tony
Tony and Sheila Clennell
Sour Cherry Pottery
4545 King Street
Beamsville, Ontario
CANADA L0R 1B1
http://www.sourcherrypottery.com

Marta Matray on fri 12 may 06


mel jacobson wrote:

>>>>>>... and what
>is marta worth? now that she has changed her name.
>marta maytree. m and m girl. she will just parade around and
>make those damn bud vases that look like small boulders.
>....>>>>>

i would like to make sure that those of you who already
signed up for the luisville nceca clayartroom show:
"budvases for mel" wont be discouraged. mel loves
budvases, but he is not going to admit it. he is very
excited about having a huge amount of budvases delivered
to him, he already made arrangements with a florist in
minnetonka for buds... i heard it thru the grapevine...
so, i am keeping track of those who promised to bring budvase
for mel. its a big crowd, but com'on guys, we still need
more entries! just e-mail me and put "budvases for mel" in
the subject line.
cheers,marta

marta matray in rochester,mn
=============
http://users.skynet.be/russel.fouts/Marta.htm
http://www.silverhawk.com/crafts/gloviczki/welcome.html
http://www.angelfire.com/mn2/marta/

Lee Love on sat 13 may 06


They do something here they call tanka firing. Has been popular
in Mashiko since I started visiting in '93 Can give you a very black
body where it is exposed, something like sagger firing.

Originally, logs were put into the kiln on cool down, not
small wood. Makes sense if you think about it because small wood is
more likely to make floating ash. Friends of mine have gas kilns
that have special doors at the bottom where you stoke the log after
cooldown. It is very heavy reduction and not all glazes like it (some
will bubble off.) But they discovered you can get the same effect with
gas or oil, so most people have switched from logs to gas or oil
cooldown reduction.

Below is a 1996 article on tanka from John Neely:

*Date:* Thu, 25 Apr 1996 22:58:20 EDT
***From:* JOHN NEELY
*Subject:* Re: Reduction cooling and a bit of P.R.
**

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
Hodaka Hasebe > wrote:
> I am interested to try "Tanka" (reduction cooling ?) with a gas kiln.
> All I know is to fire to cone 9-10, and reduce down to 1650-1750F >
with fire overflowing from a burner port. (Or, In Japan, they put a >
raw wood into a kiln through a special entrance and closed up after >
cone 9-10.) This process makes clay body reduce heavily and traps > many
carbon to glaze. Does anyone know the process in details ? > Should I
close damper completely ? (I assume not) Should I use a > pilot burner
or a burner ? How heavy should I reduce? How much smoke > should I
expect in the kiln room ? etc.

Though the terms are often used interchangeably, there is an important
difference between "tanka shousei" (literally carbonizing firing, but
perhaps more accurately carbon impregnation) and "reikyaku kangen"
(cooling reduction). If what you want is to trap carbon in the body and
glaze, it is much easier to do this by creating a smoky atmosphere
during the firing, as vitrification takes place, rather than trying to
make carbon penetrate during cooling. One common method of carbon
impregnation for unglazed ware is to pack it into saggars filled with
charcoal. American style "raku," where hot pots are put into combustible
organic material is another example of carbon impregnation that is often
( and usually inaccurately) referred to as "reduction." Reduction
cooling, on the other hand, relies on carbon monoxide (not carbon!)
produced by a small reducing flame in the kiln as it cools. If the clay
and glaze have been reduced on the way up, reduction cooling prevents
reoxidation. If the firing has been in oxidation, the reducing flame
will affect only the surface. Either can produce interesting results
with some clays and glazes; I usually use the former procedure.
Incidentally, most clays will still be reactive at 1750; to insure that
there is no reoxidation, I fire down to 1450. How much you open the
damper, what burner you use, etc. depends entirely on your kiln - how
tight it is, whether you have sealed burners, etc. Smoke is certainly
not necessary - carbon monoxide is a colorless gas.

--
Lee In Mashiko, Japan
http://mashiko.org
http://seisokuro.blogspot.com/

Lee Love on sun 14 may 06


Thanks for the description Craig & good luck with the firing!

I put up some photos of my friend's Miyajima work He does tanka (heavy
cooldown reduction) in a gas or oil kiln. On the outside of the pots
is a thin glaze of just hiratsu feldspar. Note the dark clay body:

http://claycraft.blogspot.com/


On 2006/05/13 11:00:51, craig edwards (craigledwards@gmail.com) wrote:
> Thanks Lee: This sounds more on the order of the reduction that I did
this
> last firing. A large piece of wood -- and watch it smoke. When it
cleared
> repeat. The kiln is sealed tight with no draft (cap the chimney). The
wood
> burns more like a candle-- no directional movement in the flame. I got
> great body color and the shinos, and celadons were some of the best that
> I've ever had. The saturated iron glaze was trashed however. I'
> m starting the kiln up again late Tuesday or early Wednesday --
> I'll smoke it again on the way down!!
> May the great carbonifier bless me again, Craig

--
Lee In Mashiko, Japan
http://mashiko.org
http://seisokuro.blogspot.com/