Joseph Fireborn

Although the market for used pottery gear may have softened a bit, looks to still be very strong.
My only suggestions would be a) peruse recent listings (new & used) - same as buyers would do - and price accordingly, and b) keep the wheel, if you've a place for it to wait 

Yep!
See also Craigslist?
...widen your search to include metro areas within several hundred miles or more...

Sorry you can't hang on to your equipment,  if anything I would sell the slab roller.  When my son was in his teens he wanted to play the drums,  so we bought him a nice set.   We knew other drummers and they said at one point he will quit playing but don't let him sell him drums.   They said he would want to drum again someday,  twenty three years later and he went back to the drums.      Denice

The wheels sell well-I would ask 1/3 off new as a starting point-quality wheels really went up in price so find out what anew one costs to start with
The kiln well its all depends on condition-same deal-harder to sell than a both your other items due to size 
Slab roller is a easy sale as they are hard to find used-very hard really

sorry to hear you are out of clay making

A corner might be good.  Clay is such a therapeutic way to manage all sorts of stress, life events.  As we have all witnessed the last 4 years, prices have gone up and up and up.  If you decide to go back to clay, your cost outlay would not be as steep.  I hope you can find a corner.  As @Denice suggested, maybe the slab roller?  If it takes up a lot of space?  Your life is crazy busy right now, but it will change.  We had 3 kids.   We get it.   Best of luck to you Joseph. 
Roberta 

Best of luck to you Joseph. I have enjoyed reading your posts. 

Good to know. I might just find a corner in my garage and neatly organize everything. Still haven't decided on what to do. I dislike selling things because I am not a haggler at all and that process annoys me greatly.

Good to know. I might just find a corner in my garage and neatly organize everything. Still haven't decided on what to do. I dislike selling things because I am not a haggler at all and that process annoys me greatly.

I have had Brent wheels sit for a decade with zero issues on start up. Electrics same deal-I life ina mosit rainforest for winters  but no summer humidity 

Thanks for all the replies wonderful people. I appreciate it.

20 oz mug, 1 lb  (base isn't as narrow as it looks in the picture)

The things being discussed here is are not necessary to good glaze formulation. I've been making durable glazes for 30 years without ever looking at a Stull chart or Katz's papers. Learning the basic of glaze formulation- fluxes, stabilizers, and glass formers- will serve you just fine, and allow for tweaking formulas to increase durability and adjust glaze fit for your clay body.
Commercial glazes are not necessarily any more durable. They all take testing as well. Clear glazes are generally quite safe if they're free of lead and cadmium, which most all glaze recipes being used nowadays are, and they don't have the heavy metals (colorants) in them that are likely to leach in a poorly formulated glaze. The benefits of mixing your own glazes are that they are much less expensive, and you can alter them as needed to fit the clay body you're using. If you know another potter that has a good clear glaze, by all means ask them for a recipe.

I pour outside, finger swipe, spray through stencils. . . weeds, found objects. . . .lace, artificial branches etc, all over textured surfaces that break the glaze even more.
 
best,
Pres

Pour inside, spray outside.  I will say spraying is a labor of love. Takes a lot longer to spray a pot than dip it, and it can be difficult to get consistent results. Dipping is definitely a better method. I need to embrace it more.

Pour inside, spray outside.  I will say spraying is a labor of love. Takes a lot longer to spray a pot than dip it, and it can be difficult to get consistent results. Dipping is definitely a better method. I need to embrace it more.

Pour inside, spray outside.  I will say spraying is a labor of love. Takes a lot longer to spray a pot than dip it, and it can be difficult to get consistent results. Dipping is definitely a better method. I need to embrace it more.

I felt like the results thread was a nice place to see all the work finished, but I also liked seeing the works in progress posted on the actual topic. I feel like the results thread was a lot of extra work for you Joel and we should have just posted our works in progress and final pictures as went in the same place. 

I always find the discussions of success interesting. Success is such a hard word to pin down, what some people consider success to others might be laughable.
A potter making 50K a year in profits(not revenue) might be wildly successful to themselves, but someone else might consider that awful with the amount of manual labor it took for a person to do that in most cases. Making pots as an individual is really hard work no matter what techniques you use.
Success is really up to the individual, if you are happy making 10K a year in profits and are securing your lively hood through another manner, congrats you are happy and successful!
Pottery as a business is probably one of the most challenging forms of art type business you can take on. The equipment is large, the materials are heavy, the ingredients are a hazard and the time and manual labor that goes into each piece is usually under valued.  If you sell in person, you have to haul tons of stuff to a fair or show. If you sell online, you have to package and ship materials that are fragile and cannot be easily replaced. Neither of those things are optimal. It really is one of the most challenging sole owner businesses out there. Which probably explains why there are not a lot of individual million dollar potters, but plenty rich in livelihood, joy and a good bit of money.
I had a fundamental problem with pottery and turning it into a business, it doesn't scale very well. At some point you are going to cap out on the amount of shows you can do, pots you can make, and boxes you can pack. If you want to push into 6 figures you have to be really smart with what you do and be savvy in time management. It isn't easy to do and as others have shown it definitely is possible to do; but other types of businesses can scale so much easier with a single person and modern machinery.
I really like making pots and I like selling them too. Knowing someone is drinking out of my cups year after year experiencing joy is a nice feeling. It is one of the best reasons to be a potter. Not many forms of art are used daily in such an important thing as nourishment of our bodies.  I still think being rich in joy is way better than being rich in money. Unfortunately you need both!
I think I agree with GEP on this subject of instagram. Those people with millions of followers are wildly successful at getting likes and follows, but really they are earning way more money for instagram than themselves. That being said I know that instagram can add to your sales and get visibility to your shop, but I think the potters who utilize it the best are not the ones who have the quarterly flash sales, it is the potters who have a constant online shop available for the impulse buys. When someone is scrolling through their feed and the algorithm places one of your pots on their feed, they click through, click to your website and convert. That conversion can be a newsletter signup, clicking your show dates, or buying a pot from your shop. If you don't have any thing like this available and you are on instagram, then you need to make an adjustment.

That article is amazing. Book marking that. I don't know if I will ever have to do that, but if I do. Wow.

Detailed notes might be helpful, as new accidents may occur (likely), and some o' them happy as well!
I wanted to suggest using cookies, just in case, aka waster slab, a thin slab of clay the glazed ware sits on, which will prevent running glaze from pooling up on the the kiln shelving.

If you do suspect something is mislabelled it would be a good idea to try and figure out what is actually in the bag. David Hewitt and Mike Bailey wrote an article on trying to solve the mystery of what's inside unlabelled bags and buckets, it's a good article, might help. Firing a small amount of the material in either a tiny bowl or a depression in a slab of clay is a good start. Try about a 1/2 tsp from the bag of what you think is Gerstley Borate, see if you get a puddle of melted pale tan coloured crazed "glaze" at bisque temps.

That glaze does not have any Gerstley Borate. There is no way it would look like that unless you under-fired it. The fact that you can put another glaze on top of it and it is still mostly on the test tile means there is definitely no GB, unless that other glaze on top has absolutely no frit in it?
So if you wanted to replicate that glaze and figure out what it is, I would do this.
1. Since you said you had a few unlabeled bags, I would mix up that exact glaze but missing the 50% GB.
2. Figure out how many cups you want to use, so say its 10 attempts to figure this out. Measure out 100ml of glaze with the mystery recipe but don't include the Gerstley Borate. Instead leave that out. But use the same amount of water you would have used if it was in there.
3. Measure out 10ml with a syringe into each cup, making sure you stir well before each one. I use a milk frother for this...
4. Take your 10 mystery attempt materials that look similar to Gerstley Borate that you might have used instead. Put 50% weight(the missing GB amount) of the mystery chances into each cup. You will have to do the math on this to figure out what this should be, but it isn't difficult at all.
5. Glaze a test tile or a little test dish or whatever you want in the 10 mystery glazes and make sure to record everything.
6. Fire it all on the exact same schedule with the same load mass that you did for the first tile.
7. Pull out the results and keep any of them that look similar to the original tile, go from there.

That glaze does not have any Gerstley Borate. There is no way it would look like that unless you under-fired it. The fact that you can put another glaze on top of it and it is still mostly on the test tile means there is definitely no GB, unless that other glaze on top has absolutely no frit in it?
So if you wanted to replicate that glaze and figure out what it is, I would do this.
1. Since you said you had a few unlabeled bags, I would mix up that exact glaze but missing the 50% GB.
2. Figure out how many cups you want to use, so say its 10 attempts to figure this out. Measure out 100ml of glaze with the mystery recipe but don't include the Gerstley Borate. Instead leave that out. But use the same amount of water you would have used if it was in there.
3. Measure out 10ml with a syringe into each cup, making sure you stir well before each one. I use a milk frother for this...
4. Take your 10 mystery attempt materials that look similar to Gerstley Borate that you might have used instead. Put 50% weight(the missing GB amount) of the mystery chances into each cup. You will have to do the math on this to figure out what this should be, but it isn't difficult at all.
5. Glaze a test tile or a little test dish or whatever you want in the 10 mystery glazes and make sure to record everything.
6. Fire it all on the exact same schedule with the same load mass that you did for the first tile.
7. Pull out the results and keep any of them that look similar to the original tile, go from there.

That glaze does not have any Gerstley Borate. There is no way it would look like that unless you under-fired it. The fact that you can put another glaze on top of it and it is still mostly on the test tile means there is definitely no GB, unless that other glaze on top has absolutely no frit in it?
So if you wanted to replicate that glaze and figure out what it is, I would do this.
1. Since you said you had a few unlabeled bags, I would mix up that exact glaze but missing the 50% GB.
2. Figure out how many cups you want to use, so say its 10 attempts to figure this out. Measure out 100ml of glaze with the mystery recipe but don't include the Gerstley Borate. Instead leave that out. But use the same amount of water you would have used if it was in there.
3. Measure out 10ml with a syringe into each cup, making sure you stir well before each one. I use a milk frother for this...
4. Take your 10 mystery attempt materials that look similar to Gerstley Borate that you might have used instead. Put 50% weight(the missing GB amount) of the mystery chances into each cup. You will have to do the math on this to figure out what this should be, but it isn't difficult at all.
5. Glaze a test tile or a little test dish or whatever you want in the 10 mystery glazes and make sure to record everything.
6. Fire it all on the exact same schedule with the same load mass that you did for the first tile.
7. Pull out the results and keep any of them that look similar to the original tile, go from there.