Saving my pipes - setting up a home studio

Two sedimentation buckets is a good idea, although clay remains suspended fairly easily and will certainly migrate into the second bucket, though hopefully not in quantity. The simple way that I handle this is to just wash anything clay or glaze covered in a dedicated bucket of water (with sediment settling in the bottom), and only use the sink to do a final washing (in fact I don't have a sink in my workshop, to avoid the temptation to use it and gluck it up). When the bucket gets full of sediment (a couple times per year), I stir it up with a glaze stirrer and dump it. I agree that the sediment can usually be safely dumped in the garden, unless you use toxic glaze chemicals. (I try to keep all my scrap glazes for reuse, but some glaze from the tools and surfaces inevitably will end up in the glop bucket. The safer alternative to just dumping the container in your bushes is to decant the excess water off the top, and pour the glop into containers for landfill disposal.

Brad Sondahl

If you are interested I've got some drawings I give to customers on making a simple sludge trap using a storage box and a bucket and bits of plastic plumbing; dead easy, dirt cheap and it works very well. Email if you want them. Don't forget to do what it says in my email address:-)

Steve Bath UK

In article , Bubbles writes

I forwarded those on to her via email. She declared you a genius by the by.

Hi Steve!

As Dkat says, I already have those drawings - and I MEANT to cc the genius-mail to you too, but forgot!

Thanks for the good drawings - that puts me on the right path!

I THINK that what I will probably do is to totally avoid toxins and then to have one place to clean stuff and dump the sediment out in a hidden place in the garden - and then use the sink only to get water and do the final fine rinse of my tools etc. I should put in a trap in any case, just to be on the safe side. I think it is better, though, to dump the big bucket with lots of gudge in it often, then to have to disassemble the under-sink trap more than a couple of times a year.

Am I on the right track?

Marianne

i caution dumping the waste in the garden. while i like composting, and dump odd stuff in the garden myself, be aware that some of the glaze materials might not be good for foods like tomatoes, peppers, etc.

a friend of mine who works for the los angeles water & power tested tomatoes grown from their waste center. people always think that foods like tomatoes screen out bad chemicals as part of the growing process. it's not uncommon in much of USA to see "wild" tomatoes growing on the side of roadways placed there from waste material used to fill in trenches. i know people who like to pick these tomatoes as free-fresh food. the do taste great!

the department of water & power found that since these tomatoes seeds (not digested in humans) grew. they also grew in frequently lead laced material. the tomatoes contained a high percent of this lead.

now while you may not use lead, i don't know what *excess* copper, cobalt, iron, rutile, etc glaze material would do to us. i'm sure the tomatoes would pass this on to us.

point is if you dump it, don't eat it later. or at least check with specialist of the affect from these materials. i found that dolomite is a great additive to insure good calcium is in the soil - aids in not having fruit fall off early. (university of florida's agricultural website)

i suspect flowers on the other hand would flourish very well!

see ya

steve

I actually get very little gunk in my water bucket (a five gallon plastic ex-pickle bucket). When I throw I use the generated slip for throwing and I keep a small plaster board next to my wheel that I drop excess slip and any clay I trim from the pot when throwing. This is easy to recycle. I keep multiple buckets as well. When the clay settles to the bottom of one I scoop the clean water from that bucket into another empty or clean bucket. What is left in the bucket is easy to cart up to the garden or can be recycled (dump it onto a large plaster board or keep a 'goop' bucket that the water can evaporate out of).

I do glaze clean up in a different bucket from my clay work but follow a similar procedure. After settling overnight or more I scoop up the clean water into the next work bucket. The gunk goes into a flat tray for the water to evaporate and put into the trash (I don't use toxic materials). And yes I have lots of 5 gallon buckets (I've done lots of sheetrocking).

i don't have running water in my workshop - but a garden hose outside a ways.

i use just water buckets. which works very well for throwing & minimal wash up.

for glazing i rinse off at the garden hose (by the flowers, not the veggies).

meanwhile i suspose a dedicated bucket for rinsing off glaze might accidently be creating a cool glaze?

just a thought.

see ya

steve

dkat wrote:

composting,

process.

free-fresh

dolomite

follow a

materials).

sheetrocking).

Thanks for the complements; as an inveterate do-it-yourselfer, like most of us, promoting easy fixes is a pleasure.

Mine is mounted so that it sticks out to one side, consequently I can get at it easily to clear it out (why make life any more difficult than it already is!).

Steve Bath UK

In article , Bubbles writes

In article , steve snipped-for-privacy@aol.com writes

I tried that; it produced a rather unfortunate Brown!

Steve Bath UK

next time add ash!

see ya

steve

Steve Mills wrote:

outside a

What is ash going to do to the firing range and how much would you add? 5% addition of ash seems to increase the fluxes by about 3% (decreasing the ratio of Si and Al). I would hate to waste the Cobalt but could you get a usable black... nahhh - could never bring myself to do that.

ash certainly runs like crazy at cone 10 or there-abouts, but my point is it adds a texture or visual interest to the glaze. i've messed around with 100% ash on cone 10 pieces, making sure to not put much on for the lower portion of vases. inside bowls is great. eventually i just use 50-50 ash & porcelain & then add some colorants. i don't bother measuring, but will someday. in the begining i didn't bother washing the ash. after a while i "washed" the ash once i even heard of doing it. now i seem to just leave a bucket of ash outside for a long time & it gets rainwater & dries up so i guess it self cleans...

mason stains are a cheap easy way to add color. and aside from the pottery suppliers mason stains can be bought thru cement manufacturing sites.

i just figure a blah glaze might be saved with some ash - maybe even

see ya

steve

dkat wrote:

I know ash does beautiful things in a reduction cone 8> firing. I'm doing oxidation cone 6 so I was concerned with both the running and the effects you would get in that atmosphere and range. I suppose the safe way is to just do the inside of a bowl to see results... couldn't hurt and it certainly is nice to be able to not have to throw out anything that can be used. Have you ever heard of using charcoal ash?

i've done combinations with fireplace wood ash & bar-b-q ash. i don't know which component is responsible, but i got a marble stone affect. that *patchwork* of higher & lower tones within the same basic glaze.

see ya

steve

DKat wrote:

bother

manufacturing

Lately I've been using native clay from my garden as a glaze. It's a nice warm chocolate/Albany/bean pot brown, but a little ash bleaches it out to light ochre. I say "bleaching" because that's really what it seems like. If I dip the piece in the plain slip and then brush on a thin streak of the slip+ash blend, the thin streak seems to turn the brown base lighter as opposed to covering it. Since I am starting with liquid slip from the garden clay, I can't report the exact weight percent of ash to (dry) clay, but I estimate around 25%. (Most recommendations say to start with

Best regards,

Bob Masta dqatechATdaqartaDOTcom D A Q A R T A Data AcQuisition And Real-Time Analysis

That sounds so lovely. I really do miss Albany slip and reduction firing at times. I think Long Island is one big sandbar. I have yet to find clay in my digging... I wonder how my S.O. would feel about bringing back dug clay from our trips if I swore off loading the car with rocks? :)

I'm not doing reduction, just typical ^6 oxidation. I originally thought to use the clay for handbuilding. It was full of lime bits that needed to be sieved out, so it was very time consuming. But when used as a glaze, those hours of effort last a lot longer than when used as a body clay... ;-)

I think the idea of bring back clay from trips is excellent. You could make your own souvenir pots, glazed with the actual place you visited! You'll need to get enough to allow some test runs, and I suppose you might need to be prepared to add some fluxes to get the clay to melt. (I just got lucky with mine.)

In fact, I've been thinking about making glazes using the marl from the lake at my wife's family cottage to replace whiting. I'm thinking this may be a way to make family gifts with sentimental value. Probably a lot of local materials could be worked into glazes like this. Just a thought.

Best regards,

Bob Masta dqatechATdaqartaDOTcom D A Q A R T A Data AcQuisition And Real-Time Analysis

Well this is certainly inspiring. What I love about pottery is all of the dimensions and the potentials for adventure. If you ever get bored with one aspect there is always another to delve into. Thanks for sharing!