Blog
Posts on pottery: materials, technique, kilns, glazes, and the physics behind the craft. Written to help potters get better work out of the studio.
Burns heal. Silicosis does not. What respirable silica is, where it comes from in an ordinary studio, why cleaning wet beats a thorough weekly sweep, and how to find out whether the respirator you already own is sealing.
Studio Read →
Temperature is instantaneous, heat work is cumulative, and only one of them decides whether your glaze melted. What a pyrometric cone measures, how heating rate moves the target, and how to catch a thermocouple that has started to lie to you.
Kilns Read →
Where clay hides, the five field tests that take a jar of water and a bottle of vinegar, and the one firing that decides everything else. Prospecting is the testing discipline you already owe your materials, applied to one that arrives unlabelled.
Raw materials Read →
Plasticity and shrinkage are one property seen twice: flat particles gliding on water films, then closing up as the water leaves. What that means for warping, cracked handles, and building oversized.
Clay body Read →
Crazing, shivering, and the quiet compression a good glaze lives under: what the cracks are telling you, and why a perfect fit is the wrong goal.
Glaze Read →
How to use the kiln builder, and the masonry it models: running bond, sprung arches, catenaries, and round walls, with the counting that traces every brick back to the saw.
Kilns Read →
From Ohm's law to the Kanthal design procedure: wire diameter, hot resistance, coil geometry, and the surface load that decides how long a heating element lasts.
Kilns Read →
Inside the energy calculator: a coupled steady-state heat-loss solver, temperature-dependent conductivity, two ways to count a thick wall, and how loss becomes the power and fuel your kiln needs.
Kilns Read →
A survey of 60 production electric kilns, the physics behind the kiln builder, and where Olsen's quick formulas land relative to what is on shop floors today.
Kilns Read →
