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Thickening Glaze By Removing Water From Surface


Stephen

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I sometimes add too much water when doing the final mixing on a new 10k batch of glaze and realize I need to thicken the glaze after I test fire.

 

I have always let the batch sit for a few days and then use a small cup to pull off the clean water from the surface. This water is almost always very clear. I remove usually more than I need to and then re-mix, adding back a little until I hit the consistency I need. Is this OK?

 

I was recently asked if this removed some of the glaze material and my response was yeah it does take out some trace amounts that didn't settle but as long as the water being removed is pretty clear it is not enough to matter to a 4 gallon batch of glaze. I only do this the first time I mix and don't do this repeatedly to a batch of glaze over time.

Is this a correct statement?

 

Should I be using a flocculent if I added to much water and just need to remove some? I am adding specific gravity reading to each of my glazes for when I remake a batch but this occurs the very first time I am making the batch and I don't yet have an established specific gravity reading.

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I have removed water from glaze when it settles for over 4 decades. No issues .

I try to make all glaze thick and then add water but at least once every few months i need to do this to at least one bucket.

Mark

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i am old and do not understand a lot of very "MODERN" terms.  please tell me the meaning of the letters nbsp that you have repeated so many times?    or is something wrong with the forum?

 

It's HTML code that means Non Breaking Space. It shouldn't show up in the text, but sometimes it does if your browser isn't happy about it for some reason. I'm not a web guy so I can't give any more details than that. Just ignore it.

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Probably helps to have a sense of the solubility of your glaze ingredients, but that info is not always easy to hand and solubility works it's magic over time anyway.

 

As a practical reality I tweak the water levels if I think a small adjustment is warranted.

 

However, if you find your adding or taking away a lot of water, I think adjusting flocculation/ deflocculation is the way to go as I laid out in a similar thread you started recently about specific gravity.

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please tell me the meaning of the letters nbsp that you have repeated so many times?

 

&nbsp isn't an intentional word, it's a formatting "character" that's crept in by mistake.

http://www.sightspecific.com/~mosh/www_faq/nbsp.html

 

... possibly caused by cut-and-pasting from a WYSIWYG editor into the posting.

 

added ... I suspect that use of the "more reply options " button before posting would

reveal this sort of problem in the "post preview" window, and enable the offending

"characters" to be removed before posting.

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Morning coffee...reading Ceramic Arts Daily...I had a little laugh with this thread. I can only imagine "old lady", or as I refer to her mentally as "aged treasure", is now wondering what the terms HTML and WYSIWYG mean.

(Smiles)...Neil

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you are right that some of the terms are unknown, but i am the original WYSIWYG person.  in another life, i was the technical expert for PBX systems at AT&T for our national customer.  lost it all with the advent of "virtual calls".    i need to touch it, wires made sense.

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Hey everyone, thanks for all the input!

 

I think Mark's 40 years of experience doing this without issues provides a pretty definitive answer, thanks! 

 

I thought it was OK but thought I should ask my brain trust just to make sure. I did have one glaze that over the last five years has been little used and at one time was too thin so I pulled an unusual amount of water off of it. It was a transparent amber with manganese dioxide and red iron oxide 2% & 3% respectively and it developed an issue where once you dipped a pot in and pulled it out it immediately dried with the whole pot being covered in a cracked pattern. The glaze did stay on the pot though and when fired it did blend back, not showing the lines of where the cracks had been, but the pot would have an uneven surface, not pitted but real close. I have no idea if this was caused by pulling the water off but I had a couple of other glazes that used the same base and they never developed this problem. Could be unrelated but it was the only thing different between them.    

 

Hey Curt, I didn't start that thread on SG but did chime in a few times. Started this one because I didn't want to hijack that one with this question.

 

It's good to know that its OK. So much of this stuff I do now just out of habit and I am trying re-evaluate everything right now and really get my glaze room whipped into shape. We are at 35 glazes and I have issued a moratorium on adding any without a corresponding drop in the same number added. I would actually like to get it worked down to a more manageable 20 or so but don't know if that's in the cards. I keep between 2 and 4 gallons of each on-hand and I want to do a better job of keeping them all properly conditioned and make sure I have a consistent look form batch to batch. This hasn't been a real problem but I worry about doing everything visually and by feel so adding SG and drip readings to the mix to better control it.

 

Thanks Curt, for the prompt on the highly soluble ingredients, I am going to go through all of the recipes and evaluate to see if I should make a note on a particular glaze not to pull water off top but use flocculent instead.      

 

 

on the  

 

I happen to be a programmer in my paying gig and ' ' is a space for HTML text output and should display a space instead of the code. I have no ideal why the editor decided to save the code instead of the space, randomly, in the saved text. I typed my question in directly (no cut and paste) so those random ones in my post were inserted by the forum software in place of spaces, some time later, because I actually did proof it after posting and edited a couple of typos and it all looked fine when I was done and left.   

 

Someone may want to alert the admins so they can look into it. 

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