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Do You Store Your Glazes Dry Or Wet?


jrgpots

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My family used to make lots of "made from scratch" brownies. So we premixed a large batch of dry ingedients and stored the mix in small sealed bags. It made things easier in the long run.

 

Using this as background information, when you make up a glaze,

1. do you make a large batch and store it premixed in its dry form or its wet form?

2. Or do you mix up each batch as needed from scratch?

3. If you have a glaze which uses a more volitile substance such as soda ash, do you make large amounts or smaller amounts?

 

Jed

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I do both, I have some wet mid range glazes that are very old. 10 years+ . Moved from Montana.One in particular was a mistake batch that came out very nice. I have not worked with that range for a couple of years but it is still here and ready. Mixes well.

I don't mix my raku glazes until the day I apply them. I have some mixed dry.

So my answer is both.

 

Marcia

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I make them all as needed except for rutile blue which I have Laguna make by the ton for me dry in 50 # sacks with my recipe-then I use it as I need it as its one less to mix up. I only have one last 50# bag left than I'll be making that until my fall order of clay and materials . At which time I will order another ton. It lasts about 5-6 years.I mix glaze almost weekly most of the year.

Mark

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i have both.  because i like some of the base glazes with differing colors, i make sure i label the dry bucket with whether or not i have added any of the things not in the base itself.  like bentonite.    that way, i can take 20 grams of the base and try a new color just to see whether it will work.  makes testing lots of colors easy enough for even me, i hate glazing and testing.  but i do it.  a recent purchase of a new stain, Lobster, resulted in several tests.  so far, so good.

 

some of my glazes are from the last century.  they still work, i just don't like brown and have a hard time using them up.  i use a lot of green, and have 2 buckets, one wet and one dry so i can refill the wet one while working.  always, always with distilled water.

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In an old thread John Brit showed pictures of "red flambe" glaze that came from an old glaze that had "changed" while sitting around.

 

How do I know if my mixed glaze will be stable over time or be like "red flambe?" I have bad luck with glazes..

 

Jed

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Peach bloom copper reds actually require aging. (flambé red?) The specific changes in the bucket haven't been well documented, so I'm not sure of the exact mechanism that makes this work. Not exactly easy to replicate the results for production I guess.

 

Because of my summer foray into cone six, I now possess 20kg of dry mixed clear gloss that I'm doing line blends with.

Left to my own devices at cone ten, I keep things mixed wet, no pre-weighing.

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the water from my tap is filled with calcium.  since it is an ingredient in a glaze, the water changes the amount in the glaze. so i avoid it.

 

this is the white stuff that sticks to the taps, sticks to the buckets for washing, sticks everywhere and is unsightly. it is found in coffee machines, showerheads, and any place water sits for a time.   it is easy to shine up the metal by soaking it off with an acid, vinegar, lemon juice, or something from the supermarket.

 

this isn't as bad as the rusty stuff my sister once had.  ugh, i gave her white towels and after a month they were rust colored.  some people use water softeners but i hate that "still covered with soap feeling" after a shower.

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Thanks Old Lady. Our tap water is 'hard' - calcium I assume. We have a water softener which saves all the deposits on the sink, shower cubicle, kettle, central heating pipes etc. best investment we ever made! I've neve experienced the still covered in soap feeling myself.

 

I'm thinking a glaze test using tap water, softened and unsoftened and distilled water, would be an interesting investigation.

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I wouldn't have thought there is much difference. Wiki says hard water can have 0.18 grams of CaCO3 or what not per litre of water. So 1 litre equals about 1000 grams of dry glaze, I don't feel adding 0.18 gram of extra salts would really make much difference. Even if you were adding 1g or 0.1% extra Ca/Mg/Fe I wouldn't notice. 

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Guest JBaymore

 

Wet....30 gallon garbage cans.

 

best,

 

..................john

How many glazes do you use? 5 glazes=150 gallon of material, 10 glazes=300 gallons.

 

 

WOW. you continue to inspire us slow polks.

 

Jed

 

 

In the large volume sizes.... 9.  Couple of small 5 gallon types also for some limited use stuff.  The 30 gal cans are  not dead full.... maybe kept at between 22 and 26 gallons in each.

 

I find nothing worse to freedom and spontaneity than trying to glaze with limited material or space.  I want to be able to pour, dip, trail and so on without "worrying".

 

best,

 

.................john

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  • 3 years later...

"The water softener exchanges sodium for calcium. So soft water has extra fluxing power of sodium, albeit in very small amounts."

I'm curious if rather hard water, softened (hence more sodium) could/would have significant impact of COE - crazing?

Water here ~11 grains/gallon, hence mg sodium added per 8 oz glass of water 

   11 * 1.89 = 20.79 mg sodium* per 8oz glass of water.

My first ever glaze mix crazed mightily! I might have made a mistake measuring up small (400g) batch. The liner ("functional clear" from school's lab - no luck getting the formula, yet) on the test tumblers did not craze, at all. 

I'll add silica on the next trial, and remove a small amount to mix with my tap water to compare against RO (or distilled via evap) water. I don't want to mention the formula just yet, as all indications - the source, glazy.org analysis and chart, GlazeMaster analysis and COE, my reading and very limited experiences - are the glaze ought'o fit better.

 

*From Pure Water Products LLC website:

"...sodium you'll have added to the final product.

Although this is actually a rather complicated math problem, it can be simplified to the following:

Grains per gallon (GPG) of total hardness x 1.89 = mg. of sodium (NA) in an 8 oz glass of water."

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It takes 1000 mg to make one gram. 

8 oz of water is about 236 ml

Assuming your 400g batch of glaze contains 1/2 it’s weight again in water (200g), you have added somewhat less than  .00189 of a gram of sodium to your glaze batch via your water.  That quantity isn’t enough to make your glaze  craze.

You leave more than that in residue on the container you weigh out into. 

Unless you have unusually high levels of something like iron or lead in your water, using distilled water shouldn’t be necessary, and at that point you’re probably having to filter it to make it drinkable.  You do occasionally hear of someone using rainwater, but that tends to be someone with no running water in their studio and a rain barrel outside. 

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4 hours ago, Hulk said:

My first ever glaze mix crazed mightily!

 

9 minutes ago, Hulk said:

I'll move ahead with simple addition of more silica

If the crazing is bad, ie the craze lines are close together, adding silica probably won't fix it. There is only so much silica a glaze can take in, if the glaze already has a decent amount then chances are adding too much will result in some free silica that won't be part of the glaze melt. When that happens crazing actually gets worse. Finding a glaze with lower expansion fluxes is sometimes the solution.

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