Callie Beller Diesel
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Posts posted by Callie Beller Diesel
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On 7/17/2023 at 3:58 AM, youpital said:
is it because of creep
By creep, do you mean clay shrinking? If so, that can be measured. If you’re using a commercially prepared mix, your supplier can give you wet, fired and total shrinkage rates. It’s a good idea to verify those under your own making and firing conditions if you need precise measurements. If you’re mixing your own recipe, you’ll have to make a bar test and fire it anyways. This article from Digitalfire gives details on probably more test than you need, and you can probably skip the parts about wheel throwing and porosity. If you want more info though, there are other links at the bottom of the page to relevant topics.
What Kelly is referring to is that on a curved mould or kiln support, if you form clay (or fire it) over a dome shape, the clay will shrink while the form won’t, causing the clay to crack. If the clay is draped or supported inside a bowl shape, your piece is free to move away from the walls of the support.
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I also have a Cress with this weird setup, but a slightly different model. And mine’s from 1984, not 94.
Your infinite switch (the slow/normal/fast knob) may be aging, especially if you’re finding your kiln taking a longer time to get to cone 6. The elements being dark after 30 minutes on power level 1 are what I’d expect out of my kiln set on the lowest and slowest available. When I replaced mine a couple of years ago after I had some kiln issues, I found my kiln fired a lot faster than I had been used to. (Oddly, I didn’t have to replace my elements. Yet. Touch wood.)
There was no obvious carbon or other wear indicators on the old one when I removed it, so it could be deceiving. I also had to source an alternate infinite switch than the original, because the OG isn’t made anymore.
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I think you’re onto the right path with that. Next step is to test it.
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@Piedmont Potterydo you find that the epsom salts affect how the reclaim throws afterwards? Or is it not enough material to affect the batch?
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AI is only as smart as the dataset that it uses, and ChatGPT basically scraped the entire English speaking internet. I’m not surprised at that result. I’ve heard a lot of
I present for other consideration Derek Au’s use of OpenAI (ChatGPT’s predecessor) 2 years ago to create glaze recipes. He trained it on Glazy’s dataset at the time, and came up with results that aren’t a terrible starting place. Given Tony’s article, I find it amusing that they turned out crazed and runny.
https://glazy.org/posts/145412
That said, AI is *ideally* a tool to move you closer to the end point by doing some of the tedious work. Sure you can get ChatGPT to write an essay, or a glaze recipe, or a crochet pattern, or a social media post caption and you will absolutely get some hilariously, awkwardly bad results. But if you use those results as a scaffold to build on, it can be a huge assist. (Think using the resulting paragraph structure for anyone with learning disabilities or executive dysfunction issues, but they still have to edit for factual accuracy.)
Or just a really fun evening laughing until your sides hurt at the comments section as you go through a tiktok account with all the results of Chat GPT crochet animal patterns. Long live Gerald and his friends! To quote the Guardian article above, “It came out shockingly very accurate while still being very, very wrong.”
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It’s also helpful to remember that whether you’re using stains or oxides, you’re only adding around 10% or less by dry weight to a given recipe. So if you’re only mixing up a 1 kg (dry materials) batch of slip, you’re adding 100g or less of the given oxide. With powerful colourants like cobalt oxide, 10g or .1% in that one kilo is enough to get a very solid colour. The 10% number would be for some of the lighter coloured stains. Many of the darker blues, greens, black, etc I’d start at 3-5% and see if that gives you the intensity you want.
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Ooh! What’s it streaming on?
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I went to IG to see if there were more details in the artist’s description, and they do mention it’s a wood fired piece. The effects on Alex Olson’s pot are consistent with wood ash hitting the rim of the pot and melting inwards, changing that darker blue into a lighter one on the inner walls of the bowl. The crystals are probably from a slow cooling cycle, whether done intentionally or just through sheer thermal mass in a large kiln. Given Alex seems to be using a stoneware clay and the image Min found appears to be a white stoneware or porcelain, there’s a very strong possibility they are indeed the same glaze. I second her suggestion of contacting Clay Art Centre to see if they’ll share it.
If you aren’t super comfortable doing that, it should be straightforward enough to recreate a similar effect. I don’t know that this recipe is a shino even by western definition, although someone may have started with one as a testing point and kept the name. Shinos usually contain a lot of ball (or other) clay, and a lot of sodium bearing ingredients like Neph Sye and soda ash. So if someone lowered the clay so it doesn’t want to crawl right off the pot while it’s still drying could have resulted in a more translucent and fluid glaze. Adding a percent or so of cobalt would get you to this result quite readily. You could also take any number of amber glazes and substitute cobalt for iron in the colourants to get a glaze with similar potential to create this effect.
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With industrial bone china, setters or cranks would be made to fully support rims or other points that were prone to sagging. They also make more efficient use of your kiln space. The full support versions were basically a bowl/plate that the other bowl/plate would be fired in. The support is just made of a refractory material that doesn’t shift during the firing.
If you’re not going into mass production yet with this design or are only wanting to making a few, you can build a pile of refractory sand in your kiln and gently push the piece into it, so the sand acts as that full support. I seem to recall that Witgert has a wide selection of different grogs/chamotte, and they might have something specific for using this way, or they could possibly make better suggestions.
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You can buy gold lustre erasers that will remove lustre that got in the wrong place, those purple smudges, or if you decide you just don’t like it. It’s an abrasive stone that doesn’t damage glaze. There’s a number of suppliers that carry it online, and at the moment the average cost seems to be about $14 in Canadian dollars. If you’re going to do more work with lustre, could be worth getting one.
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Hi and welcome to the forum!
I’d wait for some more sparky forum members to chime in to be sure, but Skutt and L and L kiln’s websites both recommend against GFCI because kiln brick’s electrical resistance reduces with heat, which can indeed trip a GFCI at the wrong time. ConeArt recommends having most models direct wired into the electrical box, and suggests consulting a licensed electrician who knows kilns. (Not all electricians are familiar: my own journeyman cousin wouldn’t touch my install because it wasn’t his area of expertise.)
Edited to add: I’m shifting this thread to the Equipment Use and Repair section so it gets more eyes on it.
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Hi and welcome!
The way you have that question written, I’m picturing you layering clay slabs with toilet paper and then more clay slabs. If the clay pieces don’t contact and blend with each other, they’ll just delaminate, especially once you fire the paper out. BUT.
There is a technique where you mix wet paper pulp (no more than 20% by volume, but “to taste”)with reclaim slurry, so that the fibres reinforce the clay, and that is indeed called paper clay. You then dry the slurry into a workable consistency, and handbuild with that. The fibres gives pieces incredible green strength and makes attachments quite solid. Paper clay lends itself quite readily to really thin slabs that can be layered with each other, and pieces adhere to each other with just a little paper clay slip applied between.
There is an article on the parent website here from 2009 about paper clay that was republished recently, and it recommends using cellulose attic insulation. I would personally NOT use this material because it contains fire retardant, and that’s gonna make extra fumes when you bisque your piece.
This blog post from a former poster, Chris Campbell, does describe how to make your own paper clay quite nicely. If you want to google others, be sure to include ceramic or pottery in your search terms, or you’ll get a lot of paper mache instructions.
- PeterH, Kelly in AK, Hulk and 1 other
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Looking at the residue left in your printed masters, I think Peter and Cenmoore are correct about smoothing the surface. The striations are acting like finger prints and creating small vacuums that grip the plaster. Even filling the print with something like automotive filler or spackle, sanding and sealing it with a good waterproof finish might save doing a rubber cast.
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I want to qualify what Bill said somewhat. If your lustre firing is a third or even fourth firing for the piece, unless your clay body is unusual going the usual slow pace through quartz inversion will be fine. If you are making pieces out of a dense white talc body that have been fired 5+ times, that’s when keeping crystobalite formation in the back of your mind becomes relevant. It’s a consideration for those who layer lots of underglaze/glaze/decals/china paint in one piece.
- Rae Reich, MKG001 and Bill Kielb
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I decided to try and be more mindful of gas usage in the soda kiln I was loading mid January, and not turn the burners on while I was stacking it. Everything was outdoors, so the posts and shelves were all icy to the touch, even though it was a little above freezing. The wadding I was adding to the posts froze in place, so it felt solid enough. However when the kiln was halfway to cone 10, the stack fell over because it thawed and the previously even wadding shifted.
- Kelly in AK, Rae Reich, Pres and 3 others
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Not specifically for memorial pieces, but I’ve cleaned up mould on a bathroom ceiling that wasn’t ventilated properly. They do make specific primer to go over mould cleanup. Mould once cleaned can still leave a discolouration or stain, and that can bleed through a lot of regular primers.
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Plaster of Paris disintegrates pretty readily when exposed to water on the regular. Think about walls disintegrating when there’s been flooding.
Pottery plaster is designed to absorb water, so it holds up better over time. Once cured, it’s a lot harder than plaster of Paris.
If you get either type of plaster in your reclaim, small bits of it can create spalling or lime pops in fired ware. Basically, the clay shrinks and the plaster doesn’t. Usually it shows up right away, especially if the plaster was still holding some moisture in the early part of the firing. In some cases it can show up much later. A layer of a piece will fall off, and there’s a little soft white bit in the cavity.
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@Denice if she makes gluten free pizza dough, the stone would be even more helpful. A lot of gluten-free breads and doings are nicer when toasted.
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I agree with Pres: the biggest thing you can do to reclaim clay in a timely manner is to have a smaller reclaim bucket that obliges you to do it more often.
Also, if space is a problem, you can build stacking frames to do reclaim on, similar to the principle Tom describes. This article (there’s a paywall, but you can access 3 free articles a month) describes how to build a gravity filter press. All you need are some 2x4’s, hardware cloth/chicken wire and a thrift store bedsheet. You can use this method to build stacking frames that have a smaller footprint, and even have separate trays for the different clay types.
I do my reclaim on a similar setup, and I find as long as your slurry isn’t super fluid, you don’t need the plastic to catch the runoff. I aim for a pudding consistency.
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Salt is mildly more corrosive to kiln brick than soda is, but the difference is somewhat academic. You might get a few more firings out of a kiln that’s dedicated to soda, but you’d still have to do replacements/repair work within a comparable number of firings. This based on the observations of the soda and salt kilns at Medalta in Medicine Hat, Canada. Those kilns are both outdoors, but under a metal shed roof with walls that offer protection from the winds and precipitation, but not temperature. They use the same kaolin/alumina kiln wash, and offer a couple of wadding recipes in both. Exposure to the elements and a bit of procrastination can actually assist with soda firing cleanup if you’re using Gail Nichols’ fine soda/whiting/water mix: the firebox residue will crumble within a day or 2 depending on humidity and can be swept rather than chipped out.
The reasons that you’d want to have a soda only kiln have more to do with the end results on the pottery, as I think they found chlorine emissions from a pottery sized salt kiln were less than an outdoor swimming pool. That said, you should still wear respiratory protection when adding your sodium of choice, because both are caustic and are bad for soft little alveoli at close range.
Salt vapourizes readily in the heat of a kiln. Soda is a lot more sluggish, which is why you need to dissolve it in water to get it to travel on a kiln draft. That means soda’s inclination is to leave more directional marks from the flame path rather than salt’s more overall coverage. If you really want to create directional marks, skip the sprayer and use the aforementioned “plaster” mix, or one of the many burrito methods.
Soda gives a somewhat different colour response when used by itself, and leans towards cool/grey tones in places where it builds up. It can give a more crystalline/opaque surface where it gets really thick, especially if you watch your cooling. Salt seems to lean towards more brown, and seems to remain quite glossy. Some of this is going to depend on your reduction cycles, clay bodies, cooling cycles and a bunch of other factors, so what I’ve mentioned are more a generalization more than hard and fast rules.
If people want to work with a soda specific aesthetic, which can be quite different from salt, you have to keep salt out of the kiln you’re using. Any significant salt buildup is going to affect future firings due to that volatility.
If you’re looking to replicate a salt fired look but substituting soda ash for salt, contamination may not be a big concern for you. Residual salt can help reduce dry spots if you don’t want to be adding a whole bunch of soda ash, or if you’ve got beginners or people who may not be able to refire pieces.
- Min and Kelly in AK
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I assume they’re using glacier grit because it’s locally available, but surely there must be a larger mesh size available. I dunno.
@Jeff Longtin road salt used by itself is pretty caustic, and presents issues for roadside plants, as well as issues of it getting into waterways. Lots of municipalities will mix grit with salt to reduce the amount of salt used and increase traction. The mix will vary with climate and whatever gravel source is available locally. The stuff my city uses is like pea gravel, and it’s nowhere near that dusty. That said, our municipality does do as Rae mentioned, and they send out water trucks and street sweepers in the spring. Partly to keep the dust down, partly to keep it out of the storm drains, and partly to reclaim some of the road sand to reuse the next year.
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If you only need a few of these circles or you don’t want to order a bunch of stuff, you can also make a poor man’s sticker. Lay strips of masking tape onto a piece of wax paper and cut out your desired shape. Peel the shape off the wax paper backing and use as you would masking tape.
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Weebly is still fine as long as you don’t want to add e-commerce. As soon as you want to start adding e-commerce via Square, it gets clunky and obnoxious fast, and the financial reports are limited when you try to integrate the two. Don’t let anyone talk you into a Square website if you want to improve that reporting. Their layout and tech support are both limited and abysmal. And their templates are mostly ugly.
If you need e-commerce, bite the bullet, prepare to push it out enough to be profitable and go Shopify. Their back end is nice and straightforward, and if you need help tech support is amazing, even when you tell them you’re just on the free trial to see how the back end works, and won’t commit any time soon.