Earl Brunner on fri 5 nov 04
I do have a pair of Zetex gloves and they do work as advertised. I have
pulled pots directly from the raku kiln with them without any problem
of my
hands overheating. That said, I have two cautions - both of which apply
to
pulling with gloves, regardless of the material.
1) Never allow your glove to touch a glazed portion of the pot. At the
very
minimum you will get an imprint of the weave of the glove on the
surface of
the glaze. At the worst, your glove will adhere to the pot and if you
try to
use the other glove to free yourself, that glove, too, may adhere to
the
glaze and you will have a Br'er Rabbit and Tar Baby (speaking of older
than
dirt!) situation.
2) If you will not be heavily reducing your pieces, then you also
cannot
allow the glove to touch the unglazed portion of the pot either! The
glove
will leave some dark markings, again looking like the weave of the
material,
on the surface of the pot. If you will toss the piece into a reduction
bin,
then no problem, as the carbon in the reduction bin will hide the marks
left
by the gloves.
In our horsehair decoration, we use a pure white clay body and do no
postfire reduction so we are unable to use even the Zetex gloves to
directly
pick up the pots. To make matters worse, even normal raku tongs leave
an
unacceptable mark unless you are very, very careful in handling the
piece.
Even then we still get some unpleasant marks.
What we use for pulling pieces from our kiln when tongs are likely to
leave
a bad mark or may not provide an adequate grip on the piece due to its
shape
is a pair of "hot pads" about 9 inches square, cut from refractory
ceramic
fiber. Now, before a bunch of you start writing to tell me how
dangerous
this is, let me also say that we wear high quality half face
respirators
during our entire process. We fire the hot pads along with the pieces
to be
removed so that any organic material that could potentially leave a
mark on
the pots is burned off in the kiln.* When we are ready to pull a pot, I
take
one hot pad in each of my Zetex gloved hands and pick up the pot, being
careful to touch it only with the hot pads.
Bruce "hot stuff" Girrell
*Of necessity, the handling of pots for horsehair decoration must be
done
very quickly. As a result, the hot pads are often dropped on to the
work
table where they might pick up dirt or small pieces of hair. Firing the
hot
pads has proved to be the only sure way to prevent unintended marking
of our
pots.
Earl Brunner
e-mail: brunv53@yahoo.com
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