dayton j grant on tue 14 may 02
Hi Susan,
I dont know what other kinds of answers you may get about 'fixing' a
cracked bisque ,but if youre only going up to ^5 you do have a good
chance of it looking allright , while on the other hand if you were going
to go up to ^10 or higher it would be alot harder to 'hide' the crack and
or make it 'watertight',so ....I would say you have to get some of the
same kind of bisque that you are trying to repair you want to get this
bisque into as fine of a powder as possible (maybe by grinding some of it
off of the bottom with a hand file or you could wrap a small chunk of it
in a peice of cloth and work it over with a hammer)anyway, when you get
some fine bisque powder mix two grams bisque powder with one gram of the
same kind of glaze that youre going to put over the crack when its fixed
mix the two powders into a paste that is not too wet just barely wet
enough to stick together and depending how big the crack is try to stuff
the crack as full as you can with a needle tool or something small ,and
once youve got it as full and tight as you can ,let it dry and then put
one drop of water on it (this will carry the stuff down into the
micro-cracks too small for a needle tool to reach)after the drop of water
you may need to put more paste in the crack and when you feel like the
crack is as full as you can get it ,you put a little extra paste over the
whole crack and then 'burnish?'the whole area(you know,rub it firmly with
the back of a spoon or something like that) around the crack with a
little more of the paste ,the trick is to get as much of the patch-paste
right where you want it while the peice is bone dry ,so you have to keep
messing with it as it dries until youre pretty sure its not going to move
or shrink any more until it gets fired ,I hope this helps <;0)
Dayton
(now working out of 'Echo Ceramics'in L.A.)
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