fire brick crumbling little pieces of fire brick stuck to glaze

[arbust91]

I have a 16 year old skutt that has worked well for along time. Recently I calculated some EPK for kiln wash.

Thing have not been the same since. A lot of little bits of fire brick came off during this firing. 

I took the kiln a part for maintance, and fixed the various drooping elements and cleaned up the chips the larger ones I repaired

with pieces of fire brick cut to fit and some kiln cement. In the last 2 glaze firings I'm ending up with little bits of 

what looks like fire brick on some of the surfaces. I thoroughly brushed the brick and vacuumed very gently the element recesses and the whole kiln. 

After the 1 st time I saw the bits on a couple pots I re cleaned and I scrubbed down and washed the bottom sides of all my shelfs and plate stackers just in case. 

It happened again. 

Any advise? has anyone else had this problem?

Can any of these pots be salvaged?

Thanks

[Denice]

What did you use the kiln wash on?  You could probably use a dremel tool and stone to grind out the impurity and touch it up with the glaze and refire.     Could it be your lid?  I have a Skutt 1027 that is 30 plus years old and I am on my third lid.  You could put a shelf above your glazed pieces and below the lid to help protect your finish until you can get a lid that isn't cracked.   Denice

[yappystudent]

I had this problem with a shop that fired my work for me. The only hint I can give is that they didn't trust that my glazes wouldn't run and they told me they used a lot of kiln wash. 

[Dick White]

Some practical considerations regarding kiln wash:

Wash only the top side of a shelf. The bottom side of the shelf should be bare clean shelf so that chips of wash do not fall off into the glazed work on the shelf below. This also means you cannot randomly flip your shelves in the hopes of evening out warpage. If you wish to flip a shelf, you'll need to clean off all old wash from what will now be the underside of the shelf.

When you apply the wash, keep it 1/2" or so away from the edge and do not let any dribble over onto the edge of the shelf. Those little drips will get knocked loose while handling the shelf during loading and will, like chips from the underside (see above) inevitably fall onto a piece below.

Use a wash recipe that is known to be solid and not peel and flake off. My preference is 50% alumina hydrate, 25% kaolin, 25% calcined kaolin. Some also add 1% feldspar just to help it fuse to the shelf better, but I haven't needed that.

 

dw