Lead Glaze Recipes (No Safety Lectures Please)

[liambesaw]

1 hour ago, NatashaG said:

I come to this discussion because I would like to make Otto's texture, a vivid, opaque, scarlet glaze, the recipe for which is printed in Dry Glazes by Jeremy Jergen by 2009.

I find it really surprising that this book published well into this century has this recipe which requires 67% red lead without any mention that you readers will almost certainly not be able to get the main material. Nor does he offer a substitute, indeed i think there is an entire chapter on the subject. The actual book is at my studio so I cannot say for certain.

I am in the UK, I work in a shared studio; In Production in E10. Four kilns are electric and one is gas. There is extraction from the base of the electric kilns, the gas kiln has a hood which leads to chimney.

I very much doubt I would be allowed to use the glaze, but from this conversation it sounds as though white I might yet find an informed ceramicist who might enjoy experiments firing this glaze, I am highly unlikely to find the red lead.

Natasha

If you can get normal PbO you can make red lead oxide by calcining in a kiln.  I don't recommend it though, lead has this nasty habit of volatilizing and contaminating everything like the kiln brick, furniture, other stuff in the kiln, etc.

[neilestrick]

You'll contaminate any kiln it's fired in, which means any pots fired in that kiln from then on are potentially unsafe despite what they're made of.

[Mark C.]

I had some Red lead back in the day-it was used in raku work in the early 70s-I disposed of it in a community hazardous pick up day long ago-also did that with a new #25# bag of white lead.

On a side note the Golden gate bridge ws painted with red lead paint for 60-70 years before they sandbasted it off and made the same color with more mondern paints without lead. Same deal with Caldrere mobile sculptures.Red lead was pretty common in the 60's.