HyperGlaze Tips

Often we make new versions, new colors, slight variants, etc. of a particular glaze. While you can keep notes on this type of thing in the Comments section of HyperGlaze, it may be more useful to have a separate recipe for your ‘new’ glaze.

The easiest way to do this is to go to the original recipe in HyperGlaze, then choose Duplicate Card from the Edit menu of the Glazes window. You’ll instantly get an exact copy of the original recipe. Rename it (add ‘revised’ or some other way to know it’s a different recipe), and then add your other changes to the recipe and save.

This is an easy way to work with the recipe, adding ingredients or changing amounts to see how the estimated thermal expansion or molecular formula changes. If you’d like to have the original recipe in a window to compare it to your altered recipe, go to the original recipe, choose ‘Compare Glazes’ from the Glazes menu, and when the window opens, click the ‘Get Current Glaze’ button at the bottom of the Compare Glazes window. You’ll see the recipe in the Glazes window repeated in the Compare Glazes window. This window floats over other windows, so move it to a convenient spot on the screen, then go back to the Glazes window and find the new glaze that you’re altering. You can go anywhere in HyperGlaze and the Compare Glazes window will stay visible until you close it. Even when you open it later, it will still show the last recipe you chose to view.

You can email recipes from HyperGlaze very easily. If your friend has a copy of HyperGlaze, send the recipe as a HyperGlaze file that they can import right into HyperGlaze without having to retype it. If they don’t have a copy of HyperGlaze, you can still quickly send a recipe as email text. Here’s how to do both.

Let’s do the email text version first (also helpful for making those glaze handouts!).
Go to the recipe you want to export, and make sure you’re in the Glazes window. Choose ‘Copy Recipe as Text’ in the Edit menu, then make your choice of one of the three submenus: Recipe Only, Include Comments, Include UMF
Recipe Only just copies the basic recipe items. Include Comments gives you the full text of any comments you’ve entered along with the recipe. Include UMF copies all of the above and adds the Unity Molecular Formula to the end of the copied text.
Then just paste the recipe into your email or a word processor!

Sending a HyperGlaze formatted recipe is just as easy: Choose ‘Export as HyperGlaze file’ from the File menu of the Glazes page. You’ll be asked to save the exported Glaze file. After saving, you can attach it to an email and send it off to your HyperGlaze owner friends. If you have several recipes to share, first Mark them using Mark Card in the Glazes menu, then choose ‘Export Marked Cards as HyperGlaze file’ from the File menu. All marked recipes will be included in one HyperGlaze file that can be emailed and imported by your friends.

About cone 6 glazes: they are different than cone 10, especially the glazes that depend on iron oxide for color - they just don’t do the same kind of things at cone 6. That’s not to say that you can’t get beautiful iron colors at cone 6, but you won’t get quite the same celadons, temmokus, etc. - the classic Japanese/Chinese colorations. Additionally, if your cone 10 glaze is a glaze that requires firing in a gas reduction firing, changing the glaze to cone 6 and firing it in an electric oxidation kiln may give very different results indeed.

HyperGlaze does work well in lowering or raising glaze firing temperatures, but the problem with some cone 10 glazes is that there’s nothing in the glaze recipes that really will get them to melt well at cone 6 even if you add more. For instance feldspars don’t really melt at cone 6 well. Changing from potash spar to nepheline syenite may give you a bit of a boost in this respect, but even neph. sy. isn’t really getting very fluid at cone 6, so frits may have to be added. I often use Ferro frit 3195 for this as it seems to be the least likely (amoung the frits mentioned below) to induce crazing problems.

What you will be able to get at cone 6 is a bit broader palette of colors from stains, especially if you fire in oxidation, and with some of the more stable new stain colors, in reduction as well. There’s a glaze you might try in HyperGlaze called Clear RB that I devised as a result of a class Lana Wilson and I taught at Penland. It’s very fluid (it actually works at cone 3 quite well and isn’t so runny), but you can make a really nice cone 3-6 celadon from it using about 0.5% Victoria Green (6204) mason stain. I’ve also revised a version of this glaze to be less runny and less likely to dissolve stain colors - recipes for both of these are below. Basically, I used HyperGlaze to raise the firing temperature 2-3 cones.

Here’s my favorite hint for trying to lower the firing cone of a glaze without any calculations: adding 10% gerstley borate to almost any glaze will lower the glaze about 2 cones. 15-20% additions of GB will take a cone 10 glaze down to cone 6, but will change the glaze somewhat. Remember to add the FULL percentage of colorant in the original recipes to the batch size that includes the GB (20 percent GB really dilutes the glaze - one fifth of the original glaze is now GB, so you’d want to add an equivalent amount more of colorants).

You can also use lowfire frits in a similar way (Ferro frits 3124, 3134, 3195, 3110) to the GB. Picking a frit that has similar qualities to the original glaze may help to minimize any change to colorant results. For instance if you have an alkaline-dominated glaze (lots of sodium/potassium), adding frit 3110 might keep the alkaline quality better than GB.

You can use lithium carbonate, too, if you’re trying to lower a strontium or barium matte type glaze, but use about half to a quarter of the lithium carb compared to adding GB or a frit. So to lower a glaze two cones you might try a 2-5% addition of lithium carbonate - start with the smaller amount as lithium is a very strong flux. It may also induce pinholing. Small lithium carb additions can be useful when switching from barium (with it’s strong affect on colorants) to strontium (which is a bit more like calcium-based/middle of the road glazes), or with alkaline glazes. For instance it will help copper give the turquoise blue of barium-fluxed glazes instead of the more greenish blue-green that is typical of strontium-fluxed glazes.

Glaze Name: Clear-RB
Cone: 3, 4, 5, 6
Color: Clear
Surface: shiny or glossy
Firing: oxidation
Testing: Tested

Recipe: Pct Amount
Ferro frit 3195 70.00
EPK 8.00
Wollastonite 10.00
silica 12.00
TOTALS: 100.00

Also add these colorants and additions:
epsom salts 0.25
bentonite 2.00

Comments:
Doesn’t craze, no bubbles in glaze - very clear, has a bit of flow if thick. Should be a good, durable, food safe glaze. Good as an oxidation celadon with 0.1% copper carbonate plus 0.5% Mason 6201 Celadon Green stain - nice light bluegreen.
Works well at cone 3, too, still a nice gloss. Good reds and orange with zirconium inclusion stains at about 12% at cone 3, but will pinhole with these stains at cone 6.
If you use this with stains like Saturn Orange, add 10% zinc oxide to make it more orange (still a bit dull orange, but better).
Dark green with 4-5% copper carbonate.
Nice celadon with 0.5% Mason 6204 victoria green stain. Tested with a wide variety of stains at cone 6-15% needed for maximum color. There’s a bit too much boron in this for use with a lot of stains - the color dissolves. Try this as a possible majolica, too - adding 12% zircopax OR 7% tin oxide, along with additions of CMC to harden the glaze surface for painting).
Nice over oxide washes on texture. Notable wash colors include:
(measured by volume - teaspoons)
bluish grey black - 9 parts Manganese dioxide + 1 part cobalt carbonate
golden tan - 1 part rutile + 1 part gerstley borate
blue green - copper carbonate 3 + cobalt carbonate 1
purple red brown: crocus martix 1 + cobalt carb. 1 + gerstley borate 2
warm gold: crocus martis 1+ rutile 2+ gerstley borate 1
softer green: crocus martis 1 + copper carbonate 1
brown black: 1 copper carbonate + 1 manganese carbonate
Penland glaze class variant modified from 2004 Kate the Younger’s Clear

Unity Molecular Formula
0.001 K2O 0.396 Al2O3 3.150 SiO2
0.224 Na2O 0.781 B2O3 0.001 TiO2
0.761 CaO 0.001 Fe2O3
0.014 MgO

Look for new posts coming soon on different HyperGlaze topics like changing glazes so that they will melt at a different cone, substituting materials, and more.