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Tony Hansen
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Chemistry plus physics. Maintain your recipes, test results, firing schedules, pictures, materials, projects, etc. Access your data from any connected device. Import desktop Insight data (and of other products). Group accounts for industry and education. Private accounts for potters. Get started.

Conquer the Glaze Dragon With Digitalfire Reference info and software

Download for Mac, PC, Linux

Interactive glaze chemistry for the desktop. Free (no longer in development but still maintained, M1 Mac version now available). Download here or in the Files panel within your Insight-live.com account.


What people have said about Digitalfire

  • Your web is great!
  • Thanks for the great resource Digitalfire is. I could not make our studio glaze without it.
  • Thanks again, and again, as always, for your ever-so-helpful web pages.
  • Thank you for all the wonderful work you do for the ceramic community.
  • Love your book! I am really into the science. You deserve some accolades for your work Tony, I recognize someone who is very serious about knowledge. Thank you for your work sir!
  • Thank you for this article. I learned more about the science in this one article (What is Deflocculation) than I have in the last 40 years of classes and conversations. Truly enjoyed this.
  • Your site is excellent and informative, you should conduct online conferences on various subjects, please let me know if you have one.
  • This is a fantastic source of on-line information. Thank you for permitting me to access the contents.
  • Just wanted to tell you I just found your site and find it extremely useful. Got it bookmarked and will be referring to it frequently. Great job! Thank you!
  • After perusing your site for some time, I am really getting the sense of what a valuable resource it is. Thank you for it.

What people have said about Insight-Live

  • I write to appreciate your good works by way of the articles you made available on the net .. Thanks a million for your good work. From Nigeria.
  • First i'd love to thank you for all the info you provide on digitalfire. it is an absolutely amazing resource and the way that you explain glaze chemistry/reactions has really helped expand my practice...I crave understanding and wisdom.
  • Thank you! Tony for all of the impressive work that you have contributed to our industry over the years. Your glaze work has been super helpful.
  • Thank you for digitalfire - it is an amazing resource (they are translating portions into Russian).
  • I personally think that collaborations with the greatest expert in the sector makes me richer in knowledge and it will allow me to discover the fantastic secrets of ceramic.
  • We've referred to your site so many times over the last year and I can't express how incredibly valuable a resource it is.
  • I'm a brand new "student" of glazes and clay bodies, and I have used your site as an incredible complete information source. Thanks for that.
  • Thanks for creating "google" for Pottery Industry. Very thoughtful presentation. I am sure thousands will be benefitted.
  • You are a real gem, your work really help me a lot.
  • Thanks Tony for your excellent stuff. I am learning a lot. Its of complete knowledge at ease. God bless you !!!

Monthly Tech-Tip from Tony Hansen

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Blog

Forget the flowers

Too much environmental impact

Hundreds of bouquets of flowers will have a significant environmental impact. I sent one and if you already sent one, I will credit your Insight-live account for 4 years, just let me know. I have other things in mind, will let you know.

Saturday 20th June 2026

GoFundMe Stopped at 20K

https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-save-digitalfire

Wow. I have been so busy I never had time to look at this. I am so grateful to everyone who contributed over the past few days. And to Dominic Legault, who set this up and stopped it. It is not the money; it is knowing that my work has been worth something to you. My friends and neighbors don't know what I do for a living. Now they do!

Maybe I should get a car! Just joking! I'll use it to better ensure the survival of Digitalfire. Laying the groundwork for that is primarily a technical challenge for me and people I can bring on board virtually. Here is the plan:

Geeky stuff starts here

It is a code-museum (because I started around 1982 using dBase II). That being said, about 5 years ago I converted Digitalfire to an API fronted database that endpoint code calls to create pages on the fly. This is coupled with a backend custom content management system that interacts directly with the database; thus, no pages are edited, only DB records. But a lot of old code is still there. Here are the current priorities:

  • The code is only partially on GitHub (required for team development and code analysis). I am refactoring it to adhere to PSR-4 coding standards (this is a rote process that I have been working on for about 6 months). As soon as I am ready, or before, I'll need help to write or improve the unit testing.
  • Document and publish the API to enable coders to create products that use the data from the API (e.g. machine translation). Explore refactoring in Python or JS/Typescript.
  • An MCP server, in Typescript or Python, to respond to queries from answer engines, thus supporting AEO.
  • Front the content management system in a secure way so that multiple people can start contributing and error checking. Convert to API access.

Other priorities that recent events indicate:

  • Implement a hashtagging system in the people database (for the newsletter) so that any who offer help can be classified and not forgotten.
  • Adopt Creative Commons licensing to enable students and teachers to quote and use without fear of copyright issues.
  • Document testimonials well to be able to demonstrate harm if the service is ever compromised.

As noted above, at the beginning of Covid, I redesigned Digitalfire as a client/server page generation system. An API, fronting the database, can run on one server while the page-generator can run on another server (by querying the API). There is a lot of caching. The content management system is custom-written for the information hierarchy; it runs on the same server as the API.

Saturday 20th June 2026

Resolution Achieved!

If you already sent, get 4 years Insight-live credit

I need goodwill with Plainsman. I know you are passionate about this whole affair in the past few days. I underestimated how much. Some were so passionate they have caused trauma with Plainsman staff, we must undo that. Having goodwill with the company I partnered with to make Digitalfire is so important and will make me so happy. We both "pulled the dragon's tail" over misunderstandings. Here is the biggest one: Digital Fire is not at risk and never was from Plainsman. I need goodwill, especially if you put staff under stress, and you can help me get it. My first idea was to fill their office with hundreds of bouquets of flowers, but now I realize that's too much enfironmental impact. I'll credit you 4 years of Insight-live if you already did.

Friday 19th June 2026

Please Stop!

Please, everyone stop bashing Plainsman. I never intended that. Thier staff is suffering under attack. They are really upset. So much of this is misunderstandings. We both pulled the tail of a dragon.

The message that I put up that Digitalfire would shut down on June 26 because I was unable to meet the demands in the lawyer’s ultimatum is what made me fearful and started the whole thing. I was deluged with messages I couldn’t hope to answer so I created a response and pasted it in. I texted that response to Plainsman as well so they knew what I was saying. I should have stated more strongly that this is not about bashing Plainsman. I am very sorry for that. They are better positioned than any other company in North America because they have their own clay deposits, I want to work with them not against them.

Friday 19th June 2026

1988 Insight logo reimagined by Gemini

The old logo is from the late 1980s and was used to promote Desktop Insight at trade shows and to advertise it in magazines and later on the early internet. It was done in Aldus Freehand, an early competitor to Adobe Illustrator. Vector graphic illustration was revolutionary at the time. Amazingly, many artists even today do not know what vector graphics is, they are still working with "pixel pusher" apps like Photoshop.

I asked Gemini how it made this, and it said: "I started with a blank canvas of random digital noise (a chaotic grid of pixels) and gradually refined that noise over multiple steps based on your prompt and the layout of your original image. There was not need for a vector stage; the smooth transitions, glowing embers, and soft gradients are baked right into the generation process from the very beginning."

Context: Here is what digitalfire.., Digitalfire Insight

Saturday 13th June 2026

Same body, same outside glaze.

But the inside transparent glaze is different

Glazing black clay bodies stained with manganese is just about impossible with typical transparent glazes. The glaze over-fluxes the clay surface and ruins the color. Worse, if it accelerates surface maturity, the body can blister or generate LOI gases that blister the glaze. How about transparent glazes over a black engobe instead? At least the body color is not lost. But the wrong transparent glaze can do what you see here (inside left).

These mugs are a buff stoneware, Plainsman M340. A black engobe was applied by pouring the inside and dipping the outside two-thirds of the way down.

Left: A L3954F black engobe was applied inside and upper exterior at leather hard. After firing to cone 6 using the PLC6DS schedule, G2926B—which is crystal clear on M340 itself—became completely clouded over the engobe because bubbles generated during firing remained trapped in the melt.

Right: The entire mug was dipped in GA6-B. The Alberta Slip particles and the melt characteristics of GA6-B promote bubble coalescence and escape, producing an exceptionally glossy jet-black surface over the same engobe.

Monday 8th June 2026

Here is what dipping engobes can do:

Go on even. In one coat. Stay put.

When you learn to make and use engobes correctly, they make magic possible. Here I am turning a dark rustic body into a smooth white one (rear mugs) and a white body into a dark one (front). The engobes have been applied at the leather-hard stage. That is the perfect time, the engobe and body are clay bodies, designed to fit each other; they dry together and fire together creating an inseparable bond.

Handles have been applied, and they have dried to stiff leather hard. Engobe was poured in, poured out, then the mugs were pressed, lip down, into it and extracted. No dwell time was needed. This dipping engobe is DIY thixotropic (not available commercially anywhere). That means I tuned it just before use, to just the right degree of gel (enough for it to drain to the right thickness, then gel just as the last few drops fall from the rim). Honestly, these are a beauty to behold at this stage, the silky, drip-free surface is just so perfect.

Context: L3954B, How stop dripping and.., Here s how I.., Why your supplier does.., Why your supplier does..

Monday 8th June 2026

Republishing of Digitalfire Content

I wish to express my gratitude to all the people and organizations around the world that have been republishing content on Digitalfire (most often with translation). They are mostly people who love ceramics and IT like me; on every continent. When people ask, I almost always agree; when they don’t it is still ok. To make things clearer I will put content under a licence to control use: Likely CC BY and ODC-BY. I feel gratitude that the pages are valued (so please don't hassle them for copyright infringement). Thank-you messages, often emotional, have arrived almost every day for many years. They come from individuals, but also large corporations, schools, organizations and even high-tech industries. Some work in the background, the mainstream or management unaware of their brilliance. I've gotten thousands of cups of virtual coffee and countless donations in the past few years. It is a little overwhelming! Some very exciting liaisons are forming with republishers; you will see them as outgoing links and added functionality at digitalfire.com.

Context: Digitalfire Reference Library

Sunday 7th June 2026

No glaze chemistry needed

At least not right away

You have 147 glaze recipes. How can you get your head around all of them? Is glaze chemistry needed? No, that's a "maybe" way in the future. Right now, you need to start organized documentation. The recipe for each. A few pictures of each fired on different clay bodies, different thicknesses. Perhaps slow and fast-cooled firing. This is what an account at Insight-live does well. What it does even better is tracking your testing. The first step is to assign each recipe a proper code number (replacing these) and write that on all test specimens and buckets. From this point on, learn. Record every observation you make about each in its notes.

Through all of this, constant use in the studio (or factory) will never stop surfacing problems (e.g. settling in the bucket, crazing, running, blistering, material issues, etc.). The seriousness of each will determine the level of attack. First, identify the mechanism of the desired fired result. If it is a base recipe plus additions of colorants, opacifiers or variegators, then check if the base of one of the other glazes has a similar surface texture and character. If so, then could the additives in the troublesome one be used with the better base? If not, then it's time to sanity check the recipe and bring out the heavy guns of at least looking at the chemistry. But in Insight-live, you only need to turn on the display of the unity formula (there is nothing else to do). Next, make sure each material in the recipe links to one in the material database (so the calculated formula is accurate). Then compare the calculated unity formula with a limit formula (often a simple sanity check, like with the recipe, quickly spots oxides that are in excess or are short.

Thursday 4th June 2026

A transparent glaze is going satin:

Is it the feldspar and kaolin substitutions?

A potter reports that a switch from G-200 feldspar to Mahavir, and EPK to Imerys kaolin, has resulted in this transparent glaze becoming more satin. Is that possible? Yes. Because this glaze is on a unity formula tipping point.

To see it, you do not need to know how to do glaze chemistry, just how to display the calculated unity formulas side-by-side. My Insight-live shows them here. The material change has little effect. But there is an anomaly: 0.29 MgO. That is magnesia matte territory. The MgO is very likely there to help bring the thermal expansion as low as possible (to avoid crazing). For people who cool their kilns relatively quickly, this fires glossy. But a material change could well affect the cooling rate needed to maintain the gloss. That being said, the potter may also be firing slower, yet attributing the mattness to the materials. Or it could be a combination of both.

This is a popular glaze, among others in the book "Mastering Glazes". In Ron Roy's circumstances, and for many others, it is glossy. But for this potter, a small change (in the recipe materials and also likely in firing) has produced this issue.

Context: MGBase3, Tipping point

Thursday 4th June 2026



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