Cone 10 mug is crazing after a year. That's OK because it's high-fire, right?

Wrong. This cone 10R grey stoneware, H550, is OK if the glaze fits. But this high feldspar glaze on the inside has begun to craze after a year. The greyer coloration around the craze lines indicates that water is soaking into the slightly porous body. And, this mug has lost the ring it had out of the kiln. Imagine your customers returning these pieces! Could they be refired to be as good as new? Perhaps. But they would return to this condition. The practical solution is to reformulate this glaze to reduce its thermal expansion.

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ChatGPT was completely wrong about the cause of glaze crazing in 2023!

A ChatGPT answer to a question about crazing

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ChatGPT was parroting common wrong suggestions about the cause and solution of the serious issue of crazing. Yet it trained on thousands of internet pages about the subject! Crazed functional ware is defective, and customers will return it. So fixing the problem is serious business, we need correct answers. Consider its suggestions: #1 is wrong. There is no such thing as an "incompatible mix" of ceramic materials. Crazing is an incompatibility in thermal expansions of glaze and body, almost always a result of excessive levels of high-expansion K₂O and Na₂O in the chemistry of the glaze. The solution is reducing them in favor of other fluxes (the amount per the degree of COE mismatch). #2 is wrong, firing changes don't fix the incompatibility of thermal expansions. #3 is wrong, refiring makes the crazing go away but not the stress of the mismatch, it will for sure return. #4 is completely wrong. Firing higher takes more quartz grains into solution in the melt and should reduce the COE (and mature the body more which often improves fit). And melt fluidity has nothing to do with crazing. Furthermore, if a glaze does not run off the ware, it is not overfired. Of course, this is the worst it will ever be, expect better in future.

A down side of high feldspar glazes: Crazing!

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This reduction celadon is crazing. Why? High feldspar. Feldspar supplies the oxides K₂O and Na₂O, they contribute the brilliant gloss and great color but the price is very high thermal expansion. Scores of recipes being traded online are high-feldspar, some more than 50%! There are ways to tolerate the high expansion of KNaO, but the vast majority are crazing on all but high quartz bodies. Crazing is a plague for potters. Ware strength suffers dramatically, pieces leak, the glaze can harbor bacteria and customers return pieces. The simplest fix is to transplant the color and opacity mechanism into a better transparent, one that fits your ware (in this glaze, for example, the mechanism is simply an iron addition). Fixing the recipe may also be practical. A 2:1 mix of silica:kaolin has the same Si:Al ratio as most glossy glazes, this glaze could possibly tolerate 10% of that. That would reduce running, improve fit and increase durability. Failing that, the next step is to substitute some of the high-expansion KNaO, the flux, for the low-expansion MgO, that requires doing some glaze chemistry.

Videos

Links

Glossary	Co-efficient of Thermal Expansion The co-efficient of thermal expansion of ceramic bodies and glazes determines how well they fit each other and their ability to survive sudden heating and cooling without cracking.
Troubles	Glaze Crazing Ask the right questions to analyse the real cause of glaze crazing. Do not just treat the symptoms, the real cause is thermal expansion mismatch with the body.

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