Jon Pacini on wed 16 jun 04
Hi Again Rita ---I hadn t realized you had posted to the list so I am
including some of my initial response below.
Those were materials that Westwood imported from Japan back when
>they were Shimpo Distributors. It was something Shimpo brought to their
>attention and it just sort of died there.
>
>I was in the Lab then and fooled around a bit with the material. I made
>little folded boxes and paper airplanes and fired them, even glazed some
>things.
>
>The glue is kaolin and sodium silicate that you could use to glue the paper
>together. It seemed to hold up quite well at high temperatures. It was cool
>stuff, but just never caught on at the time. I can see how it would make a
>great crack repair material.
I d like to Add that I did testing at the time to reproduce this type of
glue/patch material. What I can gather from my 25 yr old notes is that a
blend of kaolin, sodium silicate and vinegar was kind of a generally good
fix for porcelains and white stonewares and you could sub fireclay for the
kaolin and it worked for many stonewares. The big problem I ran across was
color matching. And no general product really looked good.
There were a couple of procedures that worked pretty well though. One I
found was to take some of the dry powder of the particular clay you are
using, make a thick paste of it with sodium silicate and use vinegar to thin
it. I was moderately successful on green ware, but better with bisque,
especially if I calcined the clay before adding the silicate.
It was pretty involved now that I think back about it. There were so many
variables involved, how thick it needed to be, how vitreous, at what
temperature and then the color situation. It was decided not to proceed with
reproducing it.
Patching cracks is a very tempting solution when you have a lot of time
invested in a piece of ware. It s been said that Adelaide Robineau patched
hundreds of tiny cracks in her Scarab Vase after the bisque fire. Truly a
worthy effort, but IMHO---- for most of us, we re better off just making
another piece.
Best regards
Jon Pacini
Clay Manager
Laguna Clay Co
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