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Every Thing Matters


Bethw13

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At a recent glaze making seminar John Britt said "everything MATTERS!!"

 I wrote it down and underlined it with a nice yellow high lighter.

 Yesterday I was figuring out the amount of oxides and colorants for glazes. I was doing it wrong. I asked my husband who knows ALMOST everything, the guy is brilliant and he was doing it wrong!

 My phone knows how to do it. I've been having trouble with glazes forever because I didn't figure out percentages correctly.

 I put way too much colorants in them.

 Use your calculator and make sure you are doing things right. I didn't do it wrong all the time but a lot of the time.

 Can't wait until the next glaze load is fired. Soon.
B

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I thought that base glazes added up to 100 so 1% is 1

Yes that is true.

 But remember those pesky decimals? .05 percent? Stuff like that. Now I multiply .05 % times 5000 with a calculator and no longer mess that up. I think there is an order of operations in there...

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To convert percentages to decimals, move the decimal point two places to the left. So 1% becomes .01, 10 percent becomes .10, 0.5% becomes .005. Then multiply by your batch size.

 

The problem for many people is that there are tons of recipes on the internet that someone has posted in their batch size, like 2758 grams or some other number that means nothing to anyone else. So then you have to convert it to 100% before you can do anything with it. But you need to leave out the coloring oxides when you do that, so that you have a nice base glaze that can be used with other colorants.

 

Glaze formulation software (I use Hyperglaze, but there are others that work just as well) comes in very handy for these situations since it will convert recipes to 100% and calculate batch sizes for you.

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Glaze software is great for working these problems out if you don't invest in one then a good spread sheet will do much the same if you are able to work with them. By the time you have all of the look up tables done, with all over your ingredients, you might as well have the software. :unsure:

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1% =1 divided by 100 as Neil stated. 0.01 so if it's 3% of 1000gm/kg etc  =3/100x1000=30gms/kg etc

Do it for your glaze and note it down in that glaze notebook! Don't drop it in your glaze bucket, everything matters but some matter more than others.

In fact I'd be testing the base glaze prior to adding the colourants as these can be the more expensive items in your glaze.

Get your cobalt wrong mega cents worth and a pretty putrid blue

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