Two Good Technical Books for Ceramics
Section: Glazes, Subsection: General
Description
Tony Hansen's opinion of two good technical books for people who want to understand how glazes work.
ArticleFor Industry
Glazes and Glass Coatings by Eppler and Eppler.
Available from the American Ceramic Society at www.acers.org
This book is a good companion to INSIGHT because it fluently speaks the 'language of oxides' and how a glazes oxide chemistry directly relates to what it does in the kiln. It overviews most aspects of enamel and glaze technology and does so from the viewpoint of a typical factory engineer or technician. The authors are clearly 'ceramic chemistry evangelists'. Fired glaze properties are all discussed in relation to glaze chemistry. In fact, you cannot employ much of the knowledge in this book without being able to convert from the formulas discussed to batch recipes using your materials. The last chapter of the book suggests that the culmination of ceramic glaze science is the applica-tion of ceramic chemistry calculations that take material mineralogy and physical properties into account.
For Potters
Mastering Cone 6 Glazes, Improving Durability, Fit and Aesthetics
by Roy and Hesselberth
It is available at www.axner.com and from many ceramic suppliers.
Although this book does not go into the kind of general detail of the above, it is likewise written by two experi-enced potters with a definite technical bent. Its premise is that leach resistant durable quality glazes have definite chemistry earmarks and the authors ease potters into the idea of looking beyond the visual and beginning to see their glazes from the viewpoint of their chemistry. They argue the value of and demonstrate the concepts of physical testing to validate and challenge chemistry observations. It showcases a collection of special purpose reactive glazes rationalizing their chemistries and discussing leaching and hardness test results. Many of the glazes are high boron and therefore fluid melt bases with plenty of rutile and titanium plus other colorants. | 
The future of ceramic recipe, material and physical testing record keeping is here.
Maintain your recipe database on-line
- Login to a private account or work with others in a group account (e.g. university).
- Nothing to install (access it using your web browser). It is always the latest version.
- Easy to import your existing data.
- As many side-by-side recipes as you want.
- Many ways to search and classify glaze and body recipes.
- Glaze and body recipes are robust, with units-of-measure, unlimited pictures with individual titles and descriptions.
- Add variations to a recipe; each with its own pictures, descriptions and name/code-number extensions.
- Recipes can link to typecodes, projects and firing schedules (all managed in their own areas).
- Standard reports and mix ticket reports with last-minute-totalling; variations report as if they are a complete recipe.
- Video tutorials, help system, contact form on every page, dedicated messaging and support ticket systems.
- It is an industrial-strength database system (unlimited capacity, fast, reliable, scalable).
Imports many file formats
- Glaze recipe formats supported: HyperGlaze, GlazeGhem, GlazeMaster, Matrix, INSIGHT XML recipes (single and multiple), INSIGHT SQLite DB files.
- Assign a batch number to imports, and later search by batch.
- Assign multiple typecodes to imported glaze and body batches (to classify) and search on these later.
- Prepend character sequences to glaze recipe names during import.
- Import the pictures and pair them to their corresponding records automatically.
- One click to automatically export the database to an SQLite DB database file and download it (for use with desktop INSIGHT or just as a backup).
- Export and import individual glaze recipes as text or XML.
Perfect for Education
- Ceramic study programs can now accumulate material, recipe and testing data year-after-year, students can login and together build a valuable ceramic glaze and body knowledge resource.
- Students already have internet connected devices, computers are not even needed in the class.
- The Reference Manager gives you quick access to the Digitalfire Ceramic Reference Database.
Learn more..
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Watch the video or sign-up at http://insight-live.com.