Digitalfire Ceramics Technical Articles

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What is the Glaze Dragon?

Section: Glazes, Subsection: Introduction

Description

At Digitalfire we use a Dragon to personify the kinds of thinking that prevent potters, educators and technicians from understanding and therefore controlling their glazes.

Article

It is the attitudes that counter your desire and efforts to control your glazes.

Defending the Status Quo

Change is needed but the dragon wants the status quo.

The 'textbook glaze and body culture' continues to dominate among potters and small manufacturers; it pursues a 'universal', 'foolproof' recipe that exists only in dreamland. The 'recipe trade' fosters a helplessness that neither 'understands' or controls recipes, that is a slave of fifty recipes that don't work instead of being a master of one or two that do.
Industry is still driven by a 'salesman model' where companies use recipes and materials recommend by salesman and move toward less in-house expertise toward more dependence on suppliers and consultants.

Roulette Wheel Approach

Pottery students are still taught to spin the 'roulette wheel' of glaze tests in the blind hope that one will not only look great but also have good application properties, reliability, hardness and durability, resistance to leaching and staining, fit, adjustability, etc. This spawns generations of students who discover hundreds of recipes that don't travel well and who lack skills to recognize or create ones that do.
Manufacturers often lack knowledge about alternate formulations and material brands and gamble that what they have is optimized to their process. They spend millions on equipment but overlook the materials.

Apathy Toward Important Issues

The dragon promotes casual attitudes and lack-of-conscience regarding ware durability, functionality, and safety even though modern methods, materials, equipment, and information afford great control. He wants you to think you are exempt from technical concerns, that you will never be held accountable for deficient surfaces that hurt the reputation of the pottery and ceramic industry.

Getting kicked around

The dragon wants to make sure you learn nothing when recipes don't work. When you 'spin your wheels' and waste years on blind alleys and dead ends he wants you to blame yourself or your consultant rather than the prevailing culture.

Oversimplification

The dragon supplies 'blinders' so that you need not concern yourself with technical issues or have in-house expertise. He advocates abdication of control to suppliers and consultants, that you sacrifice only to the god of form and surface. He promises there will be no day-of-reckoning for this attitude.

Naked Undocumented Recipes, Materials

The dragon encourages authors not to 'dress' recipes for 'travel' by supplying information (i.e. special mechanisms, why each material is used, how to adjust for expansion, surface, temperature, special firing or application techniques, etc.). He then match-makes doomed 'affairs' between ceramists and these 'naked' recipes leaving many disillusioned and ill-equipped to recognize true glaze quality. Traveling glaze recipes that have amnesia about who they are, why they are, where they've been move on and leave alienated people stuck with storage rooms full of mystery materials as reminders of the broken promises.
The dragon encourages material suppliers to provide data sheets full of numbers that don't apply to typical ceramic applications and supply little or no information on exactly what the material is, its strengths and weaknesses compared to others, and rationale behind its use in bodies or glazes. Users constantly feel that there are other better suited materials out there but the prevailing 'don't-need-to-know' culture of material ignorance keeps them in obscurity.

Out Bound Links

(Articles)
Fighting the Glaze Dragon
At Digitalfire we promote the idea of understanding and formulating your own glazes so you have cont...

In Bound Links

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Glaze Recipes: Formulate Your Own Instead
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These starting recipes use no frits and work in oxidation/reduction and are inexpensive to make. The...

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