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These test bars are fired from cone 5 (top) down to cone 06 (bottom). We are processing hundreds of these bars are any given time, managing the simultaneous testing of dozens of body, glaze and engobe projects in our group account at insight-live.com.
These took about a month to work their way through our system, all the measurement data has been entered (we will look at that in the next step). These bars show visually how this clay matures across a wide range of temperatures, from most-porous at the bottom to beginning-to-melt at the top. One thing is obvious: Most terra cottas shrink much more as they approach cone 2, commonly reaching 8%, then they begin to expand above that. This one is much more dimensionally stable, it is only shrinking about 3% at cone 2 (the #2 bar).
These screen fragment overlays are from the recipe panel at insight-live.com. The table of data shown here is from the SHAB test only. The row numbers are the specimen numbers of each bar. The first five columns are the data we collected by measuring the bars before and after firing (dry length, fired length, dry weight, fired weight). The last three red columns are the results of calculations it does on that data to produce values for drying shrinkage, firing shrinkage and fired porosity. The graph above charts the firing shrinkage (ascending line) and absorption (descending line) against temperature. These two lines are like a "fired maturity fingerprint". Finding meaning in this data enables characterizing the firing behavior of the clay. In the next step, we will compare it to a terra cotta clay body.
Projects |
Evaluating a clay's suitability for use in pottery
Would you like to be able to use your own found-clays in your production? Follow me as we evaluate a mystery clay sample provided by a potter who wants to do this. |
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