Firing Log

The gas burner is howling away. The loading mess is all taken care of … at least insofar as I ever take care of mess. My dual tank regulator is awesome. When one tank starts to freeze up, I just throw the switch to the second. By the time that one is freezing up, the other has thawed and I throw it back. When one gets too low, I can switch it out without shutting off the burner. It’s really lightened the work of tank switching — tanks are heavy and my back thinks this regulator was a great investment. Here’s the setup:

My temperature at present is around 8 mV (millivolts) in the front. It’s too cold to go back outside and check the temperature in the back Perhaps for the next firing I’ll network my kiln monitor so I can check it from inside — not during the wood firing portion of course — but the gas preheat stage doesn’t take much “in person” time.

So what’s with the temperature in mV? Find me a dual port pyrometer with digital output which allows a time and temperature graph to be generated in real time and displayed on a monitor for $80 or less. Good luck. Hmmm — make that $140 (I got mine on sale three years ago) but still, I suspect it is difficult to find a two port pyrometer with data output for that price. For what it’s worth, a pyrometer is nothing more than a voltmeter with a scale in degrees. Besides, I’m only interesting in what the temperature is doing (rising or falling) — I don’t care what temperature a pyrometer reads. Pyrometers are notoriously inaccurate at high temps anyway.

Whatever temperature 8 mV is, the chimney has been steaming all day and earlier, I know I smelled the smoke of the rice bran in the wadding burning off:

And isn’t this a great picture of spot? Obviously pre-loading but still:

I made up a test clay for the current firing. I mentioned in a prior entry that sometimes the best color on anything from the kiln has been on my wadding. What could be more obvious than to make up a batch of clay with similar materials? Why haven’t I done it sooner?

First, let me describe more fully what I want. Furutani fired pieces with incredible firecolor. I have wanted the same result for a long time, but the closest I ever came was orange wadding. I have brown and blue coming out my ears, but no reds.

I can’t speak for all anagamas, but in my firings of unglazed pottery, color is most directly related to clay. Porcelain is generally white. B-mix is sea green on the front, and rust colored on the back (I don’t like the rust). Clays from Seattle Pottery Supply are varying degrees of brown (Sea Mix (brown/tan), Delta White Stoneware (dark tan), Sclupture Buff (very dark brown). Never a red.

At one point in time, I was trying to concoct clay mixtures that mirrored the chemical composition of Shigaraki clays. There were some interesting results, but never a red. I feel my failures were related to the fact that clay is a suspension of particles rather a mass of disolved elements. Think of it this way: let’s say I’m trying to make a clay that has a chemical composition of 1a, 2b, 3c, and 4d (numbers indicate amount of mineral, letters refer to different minerals). Potters make the original clay out of two rocks, rock-one’s chemical analysis is 1a and 2b; rock-two’s is 3c and 4d.

I have at my disposal different materials: rock-a’s chemical analysis is 1a, 2b, and 1c. The other is 2c and 2d. Then I add some pure “d”, two units, and end up with the same chemical composition as the original, but a completely different clay.

You should have seen the spreadsheet — it was pretty nifty. But all that nift didn’t give me firecolor. So, back to the wadding. For whatever reason, the fireclay/silica/grog/rice-bran mix often turns bright orange. Two nights before loading day I suddenly decided to make a wadding like clay. It was two parts Lincoln Fireclay, two parts silica, and one part 10 mesh custer feldspar.

I think it was a good idea to finally give this a shot. But I made a mistake in my haste and exhaustion.

Firecolor does not come about on pieces with lots of ash glaze. Feldspar granules tend to melt and make a glassy smooth glaze. What this means is that my recipe will work against itself. The high silica content should resist glaze formation while the grains of feldspar will be slobbering glaze all over. I suppose it could be interesting, and we shall see, but I’ll have to make another go at the wadding-like clay for the next firing — one that doesn’t work against itself.