Hi guys and welcome back to my channel, Blue Nose Trading. My name is Tori Solis, and today I wanted to show you how to find a glaze recipe, and then how to read that glaze recipe, in the very most basic way. I'm just going to show you how to calculate a batch from a glaze recipe that you might find online, or in a book.
We're going to go to glazy.org. We are going to pull up Glazy, which is a great resource for finding recipes. We are going to go over here to "recipes", and then I am looking for a specific one that is going to be good to show you this example. We are going to search for the Tony Hansen 20 x5, and it's right here. We are going to pull this up. When you're looking at a recipe on Glazy... oh that's a funky one, let's go to the original, there we go, that's the one we are looking for...
So, when you're looking at a recipe on Glazy here, let's zoom in, you're going to see your ingredients. In this case it's going to be the five ingredients and these should total up to about 100. Then you are going to have additions to the base recipe, such as stain, sometimes bentonite. So this is the recipe. We are going to switch over to a piece of paper now that we have this recipe and we are going to look at how to turn this recipe into batches.
So as we have this recipe for the Tony Hansen 20 x5 glaze, what we are looking at here are percentages. These are the things that you are going to need. In this episode we are not talking about how to make a glaze, or what these things do. We are only going to be talking about taking the recipe that you found and turning it into batches. It is important to understand that the recipe as we found it on Glazy is written in terms of percentages. On the website it just says 20, 20, 20, 20, 20 to 100. So the base of this recipe is 20% custer feldspar, 20% silica, 20% wollastonite, 20% EPK, and 20% frit 3134. In addition to this base recipe you can add 5% stain to give it a color and typically 2% bentonite to give it strength and dip-ability.
Let's start here and say that we wanted to make a 500g test batch of this glaze. We are going to take the 20%, and we are going to multiply that by 5, which is going to give us 100 grams. Since we are using this simple, 20 by 20 recipe, we know that it is always going to be 100 grams of each of these things. That is going to bring us up to one, two, three, four, five. Five hundred grams. Five hundred grams is 100% of our test batch. If we wanted to add stain to that, we would do 5 times 5, so it would be 25 grams of stain. And if we were going to add the bentonite to that, we would do 2 times 5, and we would be adding 10 grams of bentonite. So the total in grams for this batch would be 535 grams. This is a good test batch size. The math is going to be the same. You take that percentage and multiply it by the number that you want to get to for, in this case it's a 500 gram test batch.
Now let's do a calculation for if we wanted to make a 5 gallon bucket of this glaze. Which, give or take, there's a few different ways to do this, but we are going to say that it is about 8000 grams for a 5 gallon bucket of glaze. We are going to take that initial percentage, and we are going to multiply it by 80. That is going to give us 1600 grams. Again, since it's a very simple glaze that uses the same amount of each ingredient, we know that we are going to be using 1600 grams of all of these materials. This totaled up is going to be our 8000 gram batch. If we wanted to add the stain or the bentonite to this batch, we would take the 5 x 80, going to do that one here because I don't math well, ok, so that's going to be 400 grams. Then we would take the 2 x 80, which would be 160 grams of the bentonite if we were going to add that. So the total batch size here would be 8560 grams for the 5 gallon bucket batch. This is a basic example of how to get your glazes calculated for batches. This is a really easy one because every ingredient is the same amount. So quickly, I am going to run through a glaze that is slightly more complicated. I will do the calculations on my calculator phone, so that you can see the work done. So let's do that. Let's find a more complicated glaze.
Here I have a significantly more complicated glaze. This is peacock green out of John Britt's "The Complete Guide to Mid-Range Glazes". It has several different ingredients and some of them are decimals of a percentage, and it also has 3 different colorants, as well as the addition of bentonite. It's the same concept that we applied to that very simple glaze before. We are going to take 38.1 and multiply it by 5, and that's going to give us 190.5 grams. Then we are going to do 19% x 5, that's going to give us 95 grams. 14.3 x 5 is going to give us 71.5 grams, and these next two numbers are actually the same amount. So it's the same there, 71.5 grams for both of these ingredients as well. This should total us up to 500 grams for this batch. Then when we add our colorants, for the copper carbonate it's going to be 1 x 5, which is easy enough, it's 5 grams. For the cobalt carbonate it will be 1 x 5 which is 5 grams. It's very basic when you are writing out the colorants and they are very easy math like this. I am hoping that this is helping you guys to understand the point.
...oh no, we did bad math, got distracted... Make sure to double check your math, or you could end up really messing something up. Like that, that would have messed things up. So double check.
To do the bucket, it's going to be the same as we did in the las one. So we are going to take 38.1 x 80 which is 3048 grams. Then we are going to do 19 x 80, which is going to give us 1520 grams. Then 14.3 x 80, three times, which gives us 1144 grams. The total for the batch would be the 8000 grams. Then we add the colorants in. As before we have 1 x 80, so 80 grams. 1 x 80 is 80 grams. 10 x 80 is going to be 800 grams. Then 2 x 80 is 160 grams. So this is the amount that you would weight out of each of these ingredients, if you were going to be making a 5 gallon bucket of this glaze. Just as in this glaze, this is the amount of this ingredient and this amount is 20% of 8000. We can double check that math here. So 1600 divided by 8000 to double check our math gives us .2, which is 20% when you turn that decimal into a percentage, so we know that we are doing the correct math.
I hope this is helpful for you guys. Again, I am not going into how to understand glaze chemistry, but if you want to find a recipe from someone who is developing glaze recipes and you want to know how to get that recipe and make something with it, this is how, this is the math.
Thank you guys so much for tuning in this week. I hope that you found this helpful. If you'd like to see more videos like this you can subscribe to my channel, and if you want to help to support my channel and make my dreams come true, you can find me at patreon.com/bluenosetrading.
Remember that you're like, super important and go hug your friends, and also drink a whole bottle of water, and I will see you guys next week.
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