HyperGlaze Tips

Nope, that’s not a typo. This month a short note about how the way your materials are processed can change a glaze - things like silica flour. One common aspect is the mesh size of ingredients. Generally, the finer the grind of the material the more easily and quickly it is incorporated into the glaze melt. The larger the mesh number, the finer the grind. Silica is commonly supplied in a number of different mesh sizes. The most common form of silica for glazes is 200 mesh and finer, but it’s also available in 90 mesh (or even coarser 30 mesh silica sand) and 320 mesh. 320 mesh silica is sometimes specified in glaze recipes, and may make noticeable a difference when it is or isn’t used in that particle size. Most other ceramic materials are provided in the United States in powdered form, ground to 200 mesh or finer so they can be directly added to glazes and mixed.

Occasionally, materials come a little more coarsely ground, or you may find your own natural source. In this case, you may want to ball mill the glaze before using to reduce the particle size for a smoother melt. However, too much ball milling can grind the glaze to too fine of particles, making it melt more fluidly than expected. Another side effect of too much grinding can be that the glaze shrinks more in drying on the pot, creating application problems. And grinding some materials isn’t recommended at all, as it may cause other problems such as increased leaching of soluble portions of the material in the raw glaze slip, or in the case of zirconium encapsulated inclusion stains (highfire red stains, for example) grinding may even destroy the stain.

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.

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.