El Dorado of pottery clay finally found!

It has been five years since getting and testing samples of an amazing porcelain-like, clean-burning, highly plastic middle-temperature stoneware raw material from south central Saskatchewan. It is far superior to anything we have now. But, due to mix-ups, it appeared its location had been lost! But coming here to search again has turned up new information and I am quite certain this is the site. Seeing and walking it has confirmed, contrary to the information we had, that the site is highly suitable for extraction. And, it is not the only site in the area, we are going to another that might be even better. The Whitemud clays here are quite different from those in our Ravenscrag quarry. On seeing the range and quality, I am beyond excited! There are a lot of ducks that have to be lined up to be able to actually extract from a site like this, but the location has a lot of advantages. The current economic realities will be a powerful motivator to developing Canadian clay sources.

Related Pictures

"Whitemud" clays in dinosaur country of southern Saskatchewan.

These are Cretaceous. Jurassic? 1km straight down.

White clay layers visible on the steep side of the valley wall

This picture has its own page with more detail, click here to see it.

This is a "badlands" slope in the Frenchman river valley. The valley exposes the "Whitemud Formation" in many places (clearly visible here part way down on the left). Two surface mines of Plainsman Clays are nearby, in a place where lower-lying rolling hills leave much less over-burden to remove. These materials were laid down as marine sediments during the Cretaceous period. The skeleton of the world's largest T.Rex, dubbed "Scotty", was found 50km east of here (in the layers just above the Whitemuds). Where are the layers of Scotty's ancestors from the Jurassic period? Straight down 1 kilometer! And another kilometer to bedrock!

A kaolinized sand that is highly plastic and white burning

This proves we can have a Canadian kaolin

This picture has its own page with more detail, click here to see it.

This is kaolinized sand from Flintoft, Saskatchewan. It is among clays we are currently rediscovering. Unlike the one in our mine at Ravenscrag, this one has excellent plasticity when water is added (notice the texture of the plastic material in the close-up photo on the upper left). This dries quickly with low shrinkage (the DFAC test disk upper right shows perfect performance). Consider highlights of physical tests to characterize this material (data shown lower left):
-Super refractory (thus pure). The SHAB test bars (lower right from cone 10R and 10 down to 6 oxidation) correspond to the SHAB test results in the chart. Even at cone 10, this has an amazing 19% porosity. With almost zero shrinkage.
-White burning: The top bar is reduction-fired yet barely darker than the one below it at the same temperature in oxidation (indicating low iron content).
-Low soluble salts (upper right).
-Centre-bottom: G1947U clear glaze on it fired at cone 10R.
I compared this with about 10 other clays in the area, doing the same for all of them, preserving a treasure trove of data for clays we have been overlooking.

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