Monthly Tech-Tip | No tracking! No ads! |
This is the G3948A recipe. Iron red glazes are easy to do in high-temperature reduction but not so in medium-temperature oxidation. Most people just try a bunch of recipes they find online hoping that one of them actually fires the way it is shown in the picture! A better approach for us was to study a range of ones claiming to be iron reds looking for things in common with the chemistries and recipes. G3948A, on these two M370 mugs, is a product of that. Unlike many, the original recipe we found, G3948, did have a suggested firing schedule. It seemed strange so we just used the standard C6DHSC slow-cool schedule. That one is also ideal for the liner glazes, giving them a better gloss finish. It was not tempting to even try the original recipe (because it measured up poorly against common sense recipe limits), but it did make sense to fix obvious issues and then try it. Unlike every other recipe we have seen, this one suffers no issues with gelling of the slurry because it contains no Gerstley Borate and uses black iron oxide. It has very good application properties and requires only 80 water for each 100 powder to mix as a creamy dipping glaze. And it does not need any lithium carbonate.
This is the G3948A recipe fired to cone 6 using our standard C6DHSC schedule. The color "breaks" to black where thinner around contours so it seemed like a natural that the inside glaze should be G3914A Alberta Slip black. The contour of the foot ring is important or the glaze will run onto the kiln shelf. My standard fluted ring foot is working well. An option would be to glaze the bottom inch or so with the black and the iron red down to that.
The glaze thickness is also the same. The firing schedule is critical with iron reds, we tried both the C6DHSC and C6IRED schedules, both of which normally produce the result on the left (with this G3948A recipe). But in both firings the result is now like the piece on the right. The one difference is this: The new batch was ball milled. My first theory was this: Iron oxide particles agglomerate and neither our propeller mixer or blender remove these agglomerates - but the ball mill does. The agglomerates must be either seeding the crystals or facilitating their growth. However subsequent failures in mixing the recipe without ball milling did not solve the problem. But neither did they melt as well as this milled version.
Glossary |
Iron Red Glaze
A type of ceramic glaze, typically fired around 2200F, where iron oxide in the cooling glass precipitates out to form a striking red crystalline mesh on the surface. |
---|---|
Projects |
G3948A Iron Red glaze: Can you help?
|
Buy me a coffee and we can talk