Colemanite can fracture and disintegrate as it releases chemically bound water during heating—a phenomenon called decrepitation. In a glaze coating, this can cause cracking, flaking and even particles being thrown off the ware before the glaze melts. The damaged layer can then crawl as melting proceeds.
These glazes contain increasing percentages of colemanite from left to right. Bare areas become progressively more extensive, culminating in severe disruption on the far-right tile. Gerstley Borate substitutes containing raw colemanite carry the same risk (the higher the percentage the greater the problem). Gerstley Borate itself is a mineral mixture containing colemanite and ulexite; ulexite is much less prone to this fragmentation. A more dependable way to supply B2O3 is to reformulate using boron frits. Insight-live.com not only helps do this but also document the testing.
Photos courtesy of Nigel Hicken.

This picture has its own page with more detail, click here to see it.
This recipe was an attempt to reproduce the exceptionally glossy surface achieved using Fusion Frit FZ-16. But supplying similar oxides from raw materials produced dramatically different firing behavior - the glaze has spattered onto the kiln shelf above! The raw version contains 35% borax pentahydrate. During heating, this releases chemically bound water and can swell—a process called intumescence, with expanded particles subsequently bursting into dust and flakes. Later, calcium carbonate releases CO2, potentially feeding bubbles into an already developing melt. Early particle ejection and later bubble bursting are both possible contributors to the spattering.
Notice the calculated LOI: 13.9% for the raw recipe versus 1.8% for the fritted one. Frit manufacture has already driven off the water and decomposition gases from the materials incorporated into the frit, combining their oxides into a glass.
These two formulas are not exact matches, but it illustrates a limitation of recipe calculation: matching an oxide formula does not reproduce the way a glaze behaves on its way to becoming glass.

This picture has its own page with more detail, click here to see it.
This is a variation on the original Gerstley Borate based 50:30:20 cone 6 pottery glaze recipe; it employs Gillespie Borate instead. To reduce the melt fluidity, I adjusted the recipe; this involved dropping the borate to 37% (bringing the B2O3 from 0.63 down to 0.5). However, crawling made it almost unusable. The reason was not obvious until I fired samples at 1550°F and 1650F. At the former, the integrity of the layer is great, but by 1650°F, the coating had split into puzzle pieces (as you can see here), some with lifted edges. As the glaze melts further, those separated patches can pull inward and leave bare clay between them. Not surprisingly, Ulexite mineral, which GB almost certainly contains, is also known for suddenly shrinking and melting.
I tried to solve another problem at the same time. GB is plastic on its own, and thus hardens the layer and suspends slurries well. Thus, the 15% kaolin in the recipe unnecessarily increases the drying shrinkage. So I substituted calcined kaolin. While it helped with that problem that was small consolation.

This picture has its own page with more detail, click here to see it.
This frit, or any of similar chemistry (e.g. Fusion F-12) IS NOT A 1:1 SUBSTITUTE for Gerstley Borate, their chemistries are too different. That being said, the frit sources lots of B2O3, which makes it a candidate to weave into recipes as the source of boron. To show the difference, I have put 100 parts of each in side-by-side recipes in my Insight-live.com account, set the calculation type to non-unity formula and increased the frit until the B2O3 in the two match. Notice it takes 118g of the frit to source the same amount of B2O3 as 100 GB. Notice also that the frit sources almost triple the amount of Na2O per weight unit (that is a big deal because it means the recipe containing the Gerstley Borate to be substituted needs an Na2O-sourcing material that can be reduced to compensate). And the frit sources 3.5 times the SiO2 (other SiO2-sourcing materials in the recipe will need to be cut to compensate). And the Gerstley Borate has significant MgO while the frit has none (so an MgO-sourcing material like talc will be needed). Minor tweaks will also be needed to reduce other sources of CaO (since the frit has quite a bit more). The recipe will also need enough flexibility to do the final matching of Al2O3 and SiO2. The GBMF test confirms the difference at 1700F; these 10-gram balls melted down onto the tiles very differently.
| Media |
Use Insight-live to substitute materials in a recipe
We will substitute wollastonite for whiting and a frit for Gerstley borate in the G2571A cone 10 matte while maintaining the chemistry of the original recipe. |
| Media |
Getting frustrated Gerstley Borate turning glazes to jelly
I show you why people love/hate this material and how I substituted it for Ulexite in this crazy recipe to make an easier-to-use slurry that fires identically. |
| Materials |
Colemanite
A natural source of boron that melts at a very low temperature. |
![]() PayPal | No tracking, No ads, No paywall, No transient content! Just organized, concise information constantly updated and improved. Was this helpful? Consider supporting me. |
Buy me a coffee and we can talk