"Thanks for your very quick response. I'm impressed. All is working beautifully. The only sad thing is that I want to get into my time machine, go back 20 years, taking all of this with me, and re-teach all those classes. How different they would be"

"If some years ago you would ask me: "What is Al2O3?" I would say it was a baseball team from Australia."

Glaze Recipes: Formulate Your Own Instead

The traffic in glaze recipes is having a net negative effect on functional ceramics in education, hobby, and industry. Books and the internet are filled with recipes that are illogical and emphasize appearance at the expense of safety, practicality, or cost. 'Affairs' with these 'naked' (undocumented) recipes have left many numbed regarding their accountability and even ill equipped to recognize true quality. This trade in recipes is fostering a culture that runs counter to the idea of 'understanding' and controlling our materials and recipes, it breeds ignorance of oxide and material sciences and the true nature of the ceramic process. It deludes many into an 'easy-fix' mentality that seeks 'foolproof' solutions that end up being blind allies that waste years and teach nothing. Implied 'ethics' suggest that the traffic in recipes be accompanied by documentation to prove givers conscientious and by critical analysis and testing on the part of recipients willing to 'understand' and adjust. Weak, leachable, difficult-to-clean, crazed, shivered, leaching glazes hurt the reputation of the pottery and ceramic industry. It is time that a 'want-to-know-why' mindset toward formulating and adjusting glazes on the oxide and material level is fostered in students. It is time that a stigma is attached to joining the 'illicit trade' in recipes and using trial-and-error bull-in-a-china-shop approaches to glaze formulation.

We recommend a 'base glaze with variations' model. When the base glaze is well understood it can be improved over a period of years. With the ability to identify the mechanism of a glaze effect and transplant it into different bases one can minimize the number of base recipes needed.

In education and pottery circles the trade in recipes has encouraged a 'roulette wheel' approach to choosing glazes and in big industry there is a brain-drain toward suppliers and consultants while manufacturers are becoming more and more helpless. At Digitalfire Corporation we personify these dangerous trends and attitudes as 'The Dragon'. The dragon wants you to believe that casual potters are exempt from technical concerns. He fosters blissful attitudes that keep us on an endless treadmill of glaze recipe experimentation and disappointment. He wants us to think that glaze chemistry is too complicated and too much trouble.

The truth is that it is a very valuable tool to deal with things like hardness, strength, porosity, leaching, thermal shock resistance, chip resistance, glaze fit, color compatibility, of your functional ware. A typical formula contains eight or so oxides and it takes a lot less study to figure out what these contribute than it does to figure out what 100 different materials do. Glaze software provides the simplest way to work with glaze formulas.