davidh4976 Posted February 27 Report Share Posted February 27 Anyone have experience with glazing pieces immediately before putting them into a Raku firing? Do the pieces mostly survive OK? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Min Posted February 27 Report Share Posted February 27 Every group raku firing I have seen does this. Usually freshly glazed pieces are placed on top of the raku kiln to warm up while the kiln is firing, taken off the top of the kiln before it's opened up then put in as the kiln by one person while another is unloading the kiln. Rae Reich 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Kelly in AK Posted February 28 Report Share Posted February 28 It’s a regular occurrence, as @Min said. I have done it many times. I have two experiences worth sharing here though. One is that a person who does workshops where I live asked that no porcelain be glazed and fired the same day because she had something blow up in a workshop. The second is in my wood kiln I had a freshly glazed piece blow up, it was near the bag wall and made of fine grained clay, porcelain like. If it wasn’t my piece and I hadn’t glazed myself I wouldn’t have believed it. I would have chalked it up to someone glazing greenware. I’d never seen a piece of bisque ware explode and haven’t since. Rae Reich 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
neilestrick Posted February 28 Report Share Posted February 28 I have seen freishly glazed pieces blow up in a raku kiln. Unlike a regular electric kiln firing, the kiln heats fast enough that the pots don't have a chance to dry out before steam happens. When I used to do raku workshops, newly glazed pots were set on top of the kiln to dry out before they went into the kiln. Once the kiln was heated up from the first firing, the bricks held enough heat that the kiln would rocket up to 800F within a minute as soon as the door was closed without even turning on the burners, so pots were set into the kiln with the door open for about 10 minutes to heat up slowly at first at get that last bit of moisture out of them. We also set the pots on cold pieces of soft brick so as not to shock the bottoms, pulling out the hot ones after each firing and replacing them with cold ones. Rae Reich 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
davidh4976 Posted February 28 Author Report Share Posted February 28 I like the idea of soft bricks as thermal shock shields. We've been using cookies, but they are a pain to remove/replace between firings. The soft bricks would be a lot easier to handle. We are possibly going to have a firing with everything being glazed immediately before the firing. So, based on everyone's feedback, I think I'll try candling the first load by running it at about 200F for 45 minutes before starting the regular cycles of firing and pre-heating the pieces on top of the kiln. Rae Reich 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
LinR Posted March 1 Report Share Posted March 1 A group of potters I belong to used to do a raku firing as a fund raiser. The members would make items in advance. We would haul all our equipment out to the site of a local fair and the public would buy a piece or 2, glaze under instruction of a member. The pieces would be dried on the lid of one of the 2 kilns we had going and put into the fire when ready. I don't think we ever had an explosion. Lin Kelly in AK, Piedmont Pottery, PeterH and 1 other 4 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Callie Beller Diesel Posted March 9 Report Share Posted March 9 I first got hooked on clay because we did raku at my high school. The only time we had anything explode was the one time we tried firing a piece that wasn’t bisqued first. Rae Reich 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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