jspoces on tue 13 feb 01
I cringe when I think of how I introduced myself to "clayart" by announcing that most of my glaze chemical buckets had lost their labels because of damp conditions in the sheltered but inadequate storage area. We took longer to build our studio/workshop than we had planned.
Glaze chemicals have been salvaged. Each unlabeled bucket now has been identified and a label once again attached front and center. I am so grateful to "clayarters" who e-mailed me with suggestions on how to proceed. In addition I am especially thankful to David Hewitt and his website with the article on "Those Unlabelled Bags and Buckets". It took a couple of months research but at the end of it I learned much more about my chemicals. I also learned how to use Excel in keeping track of my daily scribbles from the glaze room.
This is how I was able to learn the identities of my chemicals. Luckily I had a year-old inventory list to work with. I made two-inch test pots, some were numbered one to fifty. In each test pot I placed one gram of powder from each similarly numbered bucket. Some of my buckets still had their labels attached plus I bought one pound packages of anything on the inventory and not labeled. I fired all the test pots to cone five. The fluxed and fused results were relatively easy to compare with the known chemicals. Each of those test pots had a hole in the side and I used a cable-tie to attach it to the handle of the bucket containing the now identified chemical.
That left about twenty buckets of unknown refractories. I made some larger test pots and fired 10 grams of the powders to get the L.O.I. of each and also compare the fired and unfired colors with the known chemicals. In addition I weighed 1/4 cup of each chemical. (e.i. flint is heavier than an equal amount of E.P.K.) I wasn't as sure of these results but so far I have guessed right.
>From now on I will always keep an up-to-date inventory. I now know the appearance of each fired chemical and have a better understanding of the materials I work with. It was not a problem I would have wished for but it wasn't all bad. Thanks again to those that helped.
Saundra in NC
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