Panama Cone 6 Adjustment 2015
Recipe
Notes
This is work I did in 2015 (in 2019 a much bigger project developed this further). The copper and tin produce the turquoise celadon effect. This recipe is for a brilliant fluid-melt transparent base glaze, initially for copper blues and greens, but later for stains. "Fluid-melt" means it runs down off ware if applied too thickly, this is a key for achieving many visual effects. Initiailly I compared a number of recipes I found on line and finally selected Panama Blue. I removed the colorants and made adjustments to improve slurry properties and lower the thermal expansion (it has serious crazing issues). Fluid-melts have a down side: Crazing is an issue (because the fluid melt requires more fluxes, these have higher thermal expansions). Then I did three adjustments, each lowering the thermal expansion more than the last. While keeping the same brilliant visual appearance. The recipe ended up being quite different (two materials were eliminated from the recipe, their oxides supplied by the others). The chemistry of this one moves much of the KNaO to low-expansion MgO. This makes it melt a little less, but visually it is the same. Higher ZnO helps melting (since MgO is not nearly as powerful a flux as KNaO). I was even able to add extra SiO2. The calculated thermal expansion has gone from 7.7 down to 7.3. This worked well on stonewares but still crazed on Plainsman P300 and M370 (but was OK on Polar Ice). Fluid melt glazes look best on porcelains so this was obviously a problem. So I continued development in pursuit of a fluid melt having a lower thermal expansion (see subsequent articles, recipes and posts).
Description
High fluid melt glaze for reactive effects and super gloss colors