Tony Hansen on tue 18 nov 97
> Seriously, I didn't have enough knowledge to understand what
> I should shoot for in terms of limit formulae. Like the joke - I
> don't know where I'm going but I can get there REALLY fast! Speedy
> calculations, but I ended up with ??? who knows what! Anyone else
> want to encourage the glaze gurus in a new venture?
I like to personify the attitudes that prevent us from delving deeper
as 'the glaze dragon' (a term I must admit borrowing from someone else).
(Check the web page at http://digitalfire.com/imc/whatis.htm)
The glaze dragon wants you to believe that casual potters are exempt
from technical concerns. He fosters blissful attitudes that keep us
on the endless treadmill of glaze recipe experimentation and
disappointment. The trade in recipes has encouraged a
'routlette wheel' approach to choosing glazes that rarely produces
the desired effects and leaves the potter numbed about his
accountability (for safety and technical issues) and more helpless
than necessary to deal with problems. Students exposed to this approach
adopt a mindset that often dooms them to waste 15 years going
down 'glaze recipe' blind allies learning little until they realize
that glaze 'formulas' are where the real control is.
Glaze chemistry is a very valuable tool to deal with things like
hardness, strength, porosity, leaching, thermal shock resistance,
chip resistance, glaze fit of your functional ware. A typical formula
contains 8 or so oxides and it takes a lot less study to figure out
what these 8 contribute than it does to figure out what 100 different
materials do. Glaze software gives you a simple way to convert
a recipe to formula and vice versa.
> Ron, ... I think your comment about an e-mail course has a lot of
> merit. ... Why couldn't someone (you, Tony Hansen, etc.) put
> together such a computer-based course for glaze chemistry... One
> could download the course application for a fee...
You can download one for free now. The INSIGHT manual's first 50 pages
guide you through 8 lessons that clearly demonstrate exactly how you
can apply calculations to solve problems and take control rather than
being controlled! http://digitalfire.com/insight5.htm
Our Magic of Fire book takes you much further (ie material
substitution, color response, crazing, adjusting melting temperature).
You can read it on line at http://digitalfire.com/magic/toc.htm or
download it.
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T o n y H a n s e n thansen@digitalfire.com
Get INSIGHT, Magic of Fire at http://digitalfire.com
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