Joseph Fireborn

Black clay is Sio-2 black ice.

For purposes of looking at the grid horizontally then looking at the vertical test. The results were pretty close. From the Yellow Ochre Tile: 5, 8, 9, 10, 14 From the Yellow Ochre and RIO Tile: 4, 9, 20 This is just for reference comparing. I don't think modifying the grid for vertical is needed now thinking further about it. We can basically deduct from the chemistry in the glaze if its going to run a lot or not. I pretty much predicted these on paper doing what they would do here. I do think I will make a new grid with a pool and ridges though as to see more variety. The color addition method is fantastic though. I will be doing more test soon with that method. Although once you have made several test from the base like I did here, I think you pretty much can determine the tiles you like, then run line blends for different colors off a base.

Hahaha. I love it.

Always neat to see someone else grids. We have a lot of test fanatics here. Always post any grids you make, we love to see them! I wish I would have been able to take a workshop from him. My favorite part of a workshop isn't learning the techniques, but obtaining the insight, views, and thought processes of the workshop host. That is usually more valuable than the actual workshop itself. I imagine his was great! When you say re purposed grid, are you going to make a new grid blueprint? I have been thinking about it, but haven't made a new one yet.

I am not worrying about it for a while. I am going to vertical test the grids I liked from the last tiles and just work with them for a bit. If I just test too much too relentlessly I will burn out. Learned that lesson last time. I think the grid can be improved without a lot of effort with a simple mold change. I am letting it sit in my subconscious while I work on other things.

I was writing a reply to your first post when the second popped up! Curt. I think the striding man is important. I am not sure why I have never used it. I did little ridges in my tile. You can't see them here, but they are there. They are only probably 1mm in height though. I have looked extensively at your grid stuff. I am not sure I understand your 2nd post about the rooks and stuff. I think your saying that you make a flat tile but with pegs basically? This would be great if one could figure out a way to mix and stir all 35 and dip at once, like you said industrial science lab stuff. As far as stirring I think a milk frother is going to be perfect for quick stirring for us potters. One interesting thing about your post is it got me thinking about another way of doing what I want, but with a flat tile like you said. Although I am still not sure if it is better than taking the extra time for the vertical one. Basically we still make a 25mm tile square. But we divide it in half. Make one half of it sloped down, with a slight indent for glaze to be placed and sit. Sort of like the melt test on digital fire. Basically we give it enough angle so that it will run slightly if fluid. The trick would be figuring out the depression so that you could put the glaze in it and then when it melts it would still run. Then have a slight gully to catch the excess so it doesn't mess with the 2nd half of the tile. Which would be the flat test with two ridges in different heights, and a slight pool. So basically for my continued addition method you would do something like, 1 ml on one half of the tile and one ml on the other half. One half is a angled melt test, which should give you some indication of what it would look like on a verticle fired piece. Then the second half is the flat test, which is basically what we are doing now, but with less glaze since the tile is cut in half, which should make it similar to what we are already doing with the 2ml for thickness. A person would have to spend a lot of time making the mold for this particular grid, or make one really good stamp and stamp 35 tiles each time. I think I might be getting too complex. It seems very possible to make a grid mold that would have these features, it would just take a lot of time to make the initial mold, but if done right could be worth the effort. I am enjoying the conversation getting the juices going. I like doing the currie test. They make me understand a lot of what the ingredients are doing a lot better, but we need more detail of vertical melts. Here is quick sketch of the idea I am not sure if this is the best explanation, but just a quick idea.

Joel: This is what I am thinking about making. I am making a blueprint grid where I will have ridges(.25'' wide) instead of a depression for the horizontal row divisions. I have a handheld extruder. I will extrude .25'' strip that is long enough to span the 5 rows width. I will place a square or circle dent in those to match the squares below them. I will let that strip dry so I can pick it up without it distorting too much, then I will vinegar slip the depression that comes out on the actual grid tile and place in the strip. If I measure right it should just sit in there with the vinegar slip it should hold just fine. Let this dry and presto chango. I will have vertical and flat Currie test. Use my standard 2ml addition formula but put one ml in the top and one ml in the bottom. Could all fail horribly. I think the C based corners are going to run right off the vertical tiles and pool in the flat one, but really I could care less, nothing useful comes from those tiles most of the time for me as I don't do much flat work. Also going to make sure I add a pool inside of my flat tile square. If it fails, oh well I wasted a few hours making the blueprint. If it works, its 10 minutes additional work to make a grid tile, with 100% more information. Hopefully this works as it will drastically help me explore these grid tiles and progress my glaze work a lot faster.

This is interesting I like that idea. Using the same principles could do 1ml in each hole. Just need to figure out a way to catch the overflow. I like that Joel. I really do. *puts on thinking cap*

I have no idea what is going on with the green color. I am not sure cause I have never ran a grid on this glaze before. I am assuming it is the frit+feldspars and who knows what else. The 2% is the additions I added in via the spreadsheet. I added 2% to the base cups with Yellow Ochre, then 2% RIO. Everything I added was done via 2ml to the grid tiles and to the cups, using the math from the spreadsheet to make sure everything was even. 2ml is way too much for my tile without some type of pool and mountain to define the characteristics of the glaze better. I don't know if it is worth the effort or not but I am going to make another grid blueprint and dig a hole and also add a ridge. This way I can see pooling and breaking better. I still think we will always have to run vertical tiles of the grids we like though. Unless.... I was thinking is making an L shaped tile, then making a pool(indent) in both the top and bottom of the L. This way I get a melt test/flow test, and a pooling test. Run this along side the grid for optimal results? I attached an example of what I am thinking. Basically lay the top of the tile, the red dot down. Fill it with 1ml of glaze. Lay it back up, let a little drizzle out. Fill yellow spot with glaze. Push up the edges of the tile base with your fingers when making the tile, creating like a little pool so that the top red glaze wouldn't flow off the tile. Could work? Still a lot of work to create 35 tiles when the majority of them would be useless. But it solves the solution of the grid being flat only. Would need these tiles to be like 1 or 2 inches wide probably to get 1ml of glaze in each pool. I am still thinking with some real dedication you can make a better grid for testing. I will try both things. I will make a new grid and make 35 of those tiles manually, since I don't have an L shape extruder.

Okay. Here are the results of the incremental test I ran. I ran a base and then 2 additional tiles. I was going to do a third(6th tile total) and I was just to tired of stirring. So these are the three I did on a base glaze I plan to use often. I am going to attach them so you can see all three side by side hopefully. They will be in the following order: Base, Base with 2% Yellow Ochre, Base with 2% Yellow Ochre and 2% RIO. As you can see the math works pretty well. The tiles resemble each other almost identical except for the coloring changes. I think you could easily go as far as 5 tiles deep. The biggest issue is as I said above, stirring in the bloody oxide additions and keeping the oxide addition stirred up. I am going to try a milk frother soon. One of the problems I have with my grid is I need more detail. I am not used to putting so much glaze in a tile. 2% is definitely more than I need. I am going to create my 3rd grid blueprint tomorrow. I need something that leaves a pool inside of the grid so that I can put the majority of the glaze there, then a thinner amount on the outside of the pool, and some type of bulge to see a resemblance of the melt quickly... As for the method, it works good enough for me. Obviously I run an aggressive slow cooling schedule. My favorite tiles are 9, 14, 19. Tile 9 is exceptional in surface and in interest. My next step will be running vertical test on the 9 total tiles that I liked in varying thicknesses. Thoughts?

What is your favorite part of your most favorite glaze and why?

So I ran the addition method today. I will say I overestimated my ability to do an additional grid in 20 minutes. It was more like 40 minutes. The actual measuring and inserting into the cups was fast and easy. Mixed up the amount equalized it and then input the additions stirring the addition cup to make sure it was mixed. However when I went back to mix the addition that was squirted into the cup, I ended up spending about 40-50 seconds on each cup mixing it to make sure it was well blended. This was definitely the huge timesink. After the 3rd grid my wrist was hurting. Talking about 26 minutes of stirring per grid. So after the 4th grid I had stirred over an hour. However I was able to produce 4 grids today which is a lot more than I could usually do in an afternoon. Took about 4-5 hours total(I took several breaks for food and drink). So estimating that is like 75 minutes per grid(w/breaks). Which isn't bad at all. I was thinking though, surely there is a small immersion blender I can buy, or even better one that is on a stand that I can just put a cup under and press go for 10-15 seconds then stop and suck out 2ml. With a rapid blender I imagine 20 seconds would be plenty of mixing time. Also this would be super helpful for the addition mix, since it is just an oxide or something in water. So it requires a lot of stirring to keep it suspended while sucking out 2ml each time. I am going to wait and see the results of my firing on Monday and if the actual process worked even remotely good, I will look to order a stand immersion blender or what ever that is called. (wife told me, its a milkshake blender.... perfecto.) Anyways, more updates in a few days.

The reason it is .02 instead of .0196, is because it is rounding to 2 decimals. But yea. I think it is close enough. I mean we are still stirring and stuff so it never is going to be exact. But I think it is a good enough place to get the incremental decreases in base to add in the additions to keep the base close enough to make a discovery accurately. If we enjoy a cell we can always line blend again with a more accurate amount of say 200g or something. Pieter, I am rusty at math, been like 9 years since I used any.. I almost got a degree in mathematics. I changed major after Calculus 3. Just wasn't enjoying it anymore. Linear algebra and combinatorial mathmatics was my favorite. Your formula matches the numbers I got so that makes me feel confident. Thanks for that. Now to just attempt the modified method and see how it goes. Which I plan on doing this afternoon.

Here is my quick and dirty method for getting these dry mix amounts. Explanation: I am holding some rules to make my life easier, you can adjust these if you want, but I want even numbers to make it easy to do efficiently. 1. I will always remove and add 2 ml of volume from the cup, then back to it with the addition. 2. I will always get equalizing volume of the additional batch by using 80ml as my point, mixing 40 cups worth. This is so that there is extra when I am down to the last few cups worth of material. This is the same with the corner mixes. The math on 40 cups mixed with 80ml volume, makes each addition a perfect 2ml for each cup. 3. By doing 1 and 2. I keep the total volume of each cup 48ml. An explanation of the basis of my math. You only need to input the additions you want to include. The rest is done, and the dry batch for the addition that you want to mix up to 80ml equalizing volume is in the light yellow color. I calculated the dry weight at 300g for each corner, then equalized it to 470ml. I have found almost all my test this is the usual place my A corner feels about right to base the rest of my corners off. If your using some wacky glaze, might have to change this. An example of my process through the sheet: We start with an approximated dry weight of 30.64g in each cup of glaze. This is from the math by Currie in his book. After we remove 2ml from each cup our new base is 29.36g. Math is in the spreadsheet cell details. It is also from Currie. Then I take the addition I want, 2% increase each time(for this example). Say I want 4 grids after the base grid with each increasing titanium 2%. To calculate that I take the new base dry which is 29.36g(after I did the base grid tiles) and multiple that by 2% giving .59g. Then I multiple this by 40 cups. This gives us the dry batch size to mix of our first addition of titanium which is 23.49g (rounding stuff in the spreadsheet) We mix and equalize this to 80ml. Then distribute 2ml into each cup. Now we have our new dry amount in each cup estimated by the previous amount + our new amount from the additional 2ml. Our new total approximate dry per cup is 29.95g. Total Volume per cup is 48ml. Now we stir the cups and take out 2ml, and add to grid, this amount will be approximately 1.25g from the dry weight removed from the addition mix to cup. I multiply this number times my total addition percentage to get a number. Then I subtract that number from the amount removed. This is 2% of the 2% we added to the cup. Thus we can calculate how much of the base came out of the glaze. Which leaves us with the amount of base glaze we removed from the cup 1.22g. Now we take our previous base of 29.36g and subtract this amount. Giving us our new base of 28.14g in a cup of 46ml total volume. Repeat this process, continuing to subtract the additional % of the % as we continue adding incremental additions while decreasing the base each time. The math for all this can be rounded, because I don't plan on sitting there weighing out 26.99 instead of 27, or 28.14 instead of 28. I am just trying to get as close to accurate results as possible. This should work pretty well imo, as we are adjusting the amount of base glaze each time for the new additions. Spreadsheet: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1faETrVYo0Lin_2LU7GYK2BgvOuVLf3cCpefjQzRC5ns/edit#gid=0 I tried to explain my thoughts the best I can. My son is singing songs and playing games beside me, so no telling if I made a mistake in my typing, however I believe my math is correct. It appears the removal of the base does make enough of an impact to warrant adjusting for it. * the more you know theme song.* Anyways. I know this is a lot of hoopla to most everyone. However I am going to give it a shot tomorrow and I will fire probably Sunday night. I am going to do incremental additions of iron oxide. I am hoping with the addition of this method I can have 5 grid tiles in around 3 hours. I have the other process down to about 2 hours. So I am giving myself 20 each minutes for the other 4 grids. This is a huge boon to the earlier 2 hours spent on this. Also a lot more results to look at for the initial 2 hour investment. All said and done you could just ball park it and just do a line blend later. But if your going to do all the effort might as well get as close as you can. The dry batch mixes make more of a difference in number when you increase the amount added to say like 5% per addition. Then you start going up 2-3 whole grams!! lol.

Exactly man. This is what I am building now. I am almost done. I have to run to my supplier to get some cone packs. Want to make sure the schedule I am going to use is firing to exactly where I want. You have what I am saying exactly in your head the way I am thinking. You remove the amount the first time for the base grid. Then you recalculate dry inside of the wet. Add % increase. place all the test again. recalculate new base again. repeat for as long as you think is accurate for the base decreasing each time at a 4% decrease per test if using 2ml as your mark for tile.

I am building a google docs spreadsheet now. Once I finish it you can take a look.

Joel, In the book he refers to measuring 40 cups worth of 5% addition of titanium dioxide, then using a glaze syringe adding one fortieth of this volume to each of the 35 cups. He uses 40 cups as an example to make the ml math easy. 1/40 of 80 is 2ml. So basically he makes a batch of 5% titanium dioxide with 80ml of equalizing water. Then he syringes 2ml out of that mix and adds it to each cup. Making each cup have a 5% addition. I don't want to type out the entire page. I can scan it and PM it to you if you want. It is really simple. As far as the maths to work out dry ingredients per ml of glaze, it is in the back of the book. Approx Used Wet Total x (Total Dry Weight / Total Wet Volume). This gives you the total grams used. Then you divide that by 35. Which gives you grams per cup. Then you can do the math for 2ml = how much grams removed.

Curt, I understand and agree that you can use the one test on multiple clay tiles or different firings. I have done that and I was doing that yesterday. I have been firing cone 6 and 7 comparing the results between glazes. So I understand that part. However for those of us who only want to fire in electric and who are narrowing down our work to one clay body and one schedule, it really is a lot of work for a single grid. This is the reason I am searching for another way to improve an already awesome method that provides a lot of results to a more diverse method for time constraints and material waste for only a single grid. I understand that it can better to mix inside the equalized volume ABCD containers. However doing so results in needing those double batches. In his book(pg121) he talks about mixing in individual cups as I am talking about here, so he didn't have a problem with that method. He did it in 48ml of glaze as opposed to 48ml minus say 2 of that volume, which is insignificant 4% removed and 96% of the original contents still there. Comparing that to dipping of a bucket of glaze is like saying you dipping a few mugs is removing to much for the next mug to be accurate. I could see maybe on the 4th addition since you would be around 12% total base missing, but still that isn't much as long as we can accurately mix and syringe from that cup, which we assume we can do from the original curry. Again the total volume in the cup remains the same for each test. As far as the 2ml being a small amount for the grid. I am just using that as a number for the math example. You could use more if you wanted a thicker application. I don't apply most of my exterior glazes thick. So I have no interest in firing a test with thick flat glazes compared to thin ones as that is how I apply my glazes to my work, which is why I am running the test. However I don't really think 2-4ml of glaze on a 25mm tile is thin. It filled up the tile enough for me to scratch the glaze almost a 1mm deep, that is half of what he considers a thick application being 2mm. I think that is more than sufficient for my work, but again, one could go to 4ml and still it isn't a significant difference in the total volume of glaze for the next application with an addition. I could also just modify my grid to have a pool instead of a ridge on the tile(might do this soon). I made my grid to have the type of changes that I have in my work, which is normally ridges for glaze breaks. I understand a lot of people fire the currie method to see the research and science behind it all, for me that isn't the purpose, I want results that I can test and modify to replicate on my work. It doesn't make any sense for me to fire a tile with 2mm thick of glaze, I will never have a single glaze that thick on the outside of my pot, unless its an oilspot. Going from 48ml to 44ml with an equalizing volume of 470 is only 2.72 total mixed grams of difference between 48ml original. The amount in the cup is insignificant as well as far as the volume removed for mixing as you add back the same amount of total volume that you withdraw. So the cup remains a total of 48ml for continuous easy mixing. Maybe on the 3rd or 4th application I could see maybe you don't have enough base, but I doubt it(mixed sufficiently). As you will be decreasing the % additions based on the removal of glaze and the previous additions each time. So math wise the numbers work, it is just in the testing process one could make mistakes, and that is with any scientific test. The results are in the methods. If this does succeed, one thing I will be doing is finding a small immersion blender that can fit down inside my little test cups. This way I can just make my own cups that are straight sided and stick the blender down inside of the test cups. However I will say all this is theory at this point, so it could fail horribly. I plan on trying it today/tomorrow, and firing in a few days so I will see the results first hand. I am going to start with a small change in oxides so that I can more accurately compare the differences and see if the tile grid base matches with the additional oxide closely. I appreciate the thoughts and concern, definitely makes me critically think out the problems a lot better.

I think I can make it less tedious. Just use a 2ml syringe. The math can be standardized for the new oxide additions each time with a chart on the 2ml removal and additions. The most important part is it doesn't have to be exact as we can always line blend 5 tiles real quick based off the grid we wanted to get a better representation of the tile we want. The main point of the new additions is to see a lot more grids with very little work after your initial investment of time. As long as we decrease the total glaze numbers to base the oxide percent addition we should be pretty darn close. We can include the oxide additions for numerous addition as well. So if we add 1% iron. We know the total grams per ml of the cup now. Then say we want to add Cobalt. We could know the accurate one % using the math quickly. This sound correct? I just woke up. I think I will build a chart that shows the quick maths based on 2ml withdrawals and additions with the % additions and the decreasing amount of base. I will post it once I finish it. I have to run some errands this morning. I really think this addition to the currie method is substantial. Unless I am missing something here, I think it could drastically improve the speed and long term results of testing with this method. You go from 1 grid(the base) to what ever you want. You could add 2% titanium dioxide, 10% iron, etc etc and do this numerous times in what ever order makes the most sense. Quickly creating a glaze that has multiple factors. You could see what cobalt does, then cobalt and copper, then cobalt copper and iron. All while seeing the clay, silica and flux adjustments along the way. Of course you still have to do the additional leg work of firing vertical tiles, but it is a super fast way to get hundreds of flat results to look at. The best part is it doesn't waste so much ingredients with little results, which the standard test does. The other good part is you don't have to measure out all those cups a second time. You just have to syringe the quick 2ml from a well stirred oxide mix and add it to the 35 cups and mix, which shouldn't take more than 5-10 minutes total once you get the hang of it. Particularly if you have tools, cups setup for perfect mixing and an exact syringe.

So I need to figure out how much grams come out of 2 ml of glaze. Here is my math thoughts(please correct if wrong because im just free flowing this here) **Using 300Grams of glaze, and 470 equalizing volume** Dry Weight: 300 x 4 = 1200 grams Wet Volume: 470 ml x 4 = 1880 ml of glaze 1200 / 1880 = .638 .64g per ml of glaze So a cup full for the first time will have 48ml, which will be 48 x .64 = 30.72 g of ingredients. so at this point. 1% addition would be .3 grams of oxide. I did this math earlier. This is correct. So now my cup has 46ml of glaze(took 2 ml out for a grid spot). now I have 46 x .64 = 29.44g of ingredient, so it it would be still around .29 or close enough. if i like the result i would do a line blend anyways. at 44ml of glaze. took out 2 more ml for another grid spot. now i have 44 x .64 = 28.16 of ingredient. So it would be .28 grams of oxide for 1% Then Equalized to 80ml, so it would be 1/35 of 80ml = 2.25 ml added back into the cup to get the new grid test which would contain the perfect amount of oxide that equals the 1% I need for adjustment. So I could potentially get a lot of different test out of this. Doing something like 1% copper, then 5% titanium, then 5% more titanium. I think my math is right. I can just take out as much as I want as long as I keep track of the ml I am removing. Which means I can get many grid test via a single blend of ingredients. Of course all of this will need to be retested again and line blended to get the exact percents since this is eyeballing a dropper over many times per hour. lol. Still its a much better way to utilize the grid method. I will report back on this tomorrow. I was about to make a third batch of glaze and I was like, there has to be a better way to do this math wise. The whole double batch thing seems absolutely insane now, unless I am missing a key point in my thinking. I wish Ian was alive today, I would love to thank him for this method. It is beautiful for what it does, which is give you a starting point for a surface and detail of glaze that your looking for.

I agree with the larger amounts to reduce error. I don't mind wasting the small amount of materials for like a single grid test or something. However I am at the point where I am filling my 2.7cuFT kiln with slip test, oxide stains and washes, melt test, and a bunch grid tile test. So I want to get the most bang for my buck. Which makes me want to attempt this method of using the cups instead of pouring them out. Your method sounds pretty nice to reduce the waste, however I am thinking about just using the waste for more test. I have like 24 grid tiles drying right now. I plan on using them all in the coming weeks. I need to figure out the math backwards. So if I have 44 ML in a cup, what is 1% of that amount in say an oxide. That is what I need to figure out. I guess I will sit down and figure the math out. My old brain so rusty.