As Opposed to...?

The Fake Sandwich Shop is further down the street.

And More Pots....

I'm doing this return toward making pots in small steps, the amount of clay I would once throw in a morning will probably last me a couple of months.
I'm trying to get my throwing to be more instinctive and less conscious, I've mostly been a pretty controlled, symmetrical sort of thrower, but I'd look at the works of other potters who'd bash and swirl their pieces, so they'd sway alarmingly on the wheel, but those pots would now be imbued with a new energy.
Maybe I'll go there some day, but for now, I'm having a pretty interesting and fun time, being both teacher and pupil. It IS strange, because I keep getting to a point where the conscious me is not quite sure how to do something, but somewhere deep inside, in subliminal me, there is the knowledge. It's been forgotten so long, but if I can just keep the conscious, thinking, clamorous brain silent, empty it of noise, then my hands, eyes, foot (the speed control is under my right foot), all these just get on and do it.
If thinky-brain comes back and tries to interfere, then that lump of clay's doomed.
The intolerance I have to lumpen shapes means they get sliced in two with a cutting wire and autopsied, at the moment, I've got a fault of making things a bit too thin, yes, nice and light, but not easy to stick a handle on without distortion. This means more recycling. Rapid karma. Lump turns to mug, displeases, returns to lump, has chance of a better life as a jug (or pitcher, as my muse would say).
I need to work harder on my wedging, and build a decent wedging bench, but if I get too hung up in building stuff, I might get diverted too much to remember that messing with mud is what I really want to be doing.
(Though, at work today, whilst I was putting up a fence, I was thinking out a design for a home-made pugmill, using scavenged parts, and a car gearbox... Could use a back axle... I vaguely recall that most pugmills run at about sixteen r.p.m.
A hydraulic motor would be good. WooHooooooo!!!! Imagine a pottery rigged for hydraulics.... Silent running hydraulic drive to wheel, easy extruder, effortless pugmill, with power-feed ram...
oh, ohhhh, the slab-roller...
Lock up your backhoes! I know where there's a little Kubota tractor with all the rams I'd need, pumps etc... and a forklift with in-hub motors...)

I'm working on just a few shapes. Getting happier with the results, bit by bit.

-I said to my muse, all the way down the long phone-wire to Texas, what shall I make? "A pitcher", she said.

Mugs too.

I was clumsy, dented my fresh-thrown pitcher's belly, tapped it lightly from inside with a turning tool handle, but you could still see it.... "How to disguise the mark? Hmmmm...."

Turned, handled, textured:- chattered decoration, Japanese potters call this "tobiganna", if I remember rightly. It's not easy to control to get a particular effect, there are a lot of variables. I scavenged some steel strapping from a skip at work today, will make myself some new turning tools, and play with this further. I might just rub the textured areas with thinned iron oxide, no glaze.

I wanted to get more of a spiral effect, kinda failed. But overall I'm reasonably happy

A Bit Closer

A bit closer to what I want, it's coming back to me in leaps and bounds. The clay, an anonymous buff stoneware is not my favourite for throwing, but it's behaving really well in drying with no cracking at all so far, but of course, that's all from a very small sample batch, no idea how it fires yet, either. I can't believe I let my hybrid fastfire wood kiln be bulldozed only a year or so ago....
Depression does that to you. You feel unable to make decisions, so you just let it go..... At the time, I suppose it was the right thing to do, I had nowhere to stack the bricks, nowhere to build a fire-gushing box of hotness. Still don't.

Of Kiln Programmers, Pyrometers, and past Battles.

I'm seeing an electrician to discuss getting a power supply wired in for my kiln.

In earlier times, I've been used to staying by kilns, nursing them carefully, turning up the power zone-by zone, watching the pyrometer dial, plotting temperature-rise on a graph at fifteen-minute intervals, ohhhh, the electric ones were the easiest.
But gas, oil, or, heaven-forbid, wood... Chopping wood, feeding fireboxes, raking ashes, constantly monitoring not just the temperature rise, but also the atmosphere, the proportion of free oxygen in the kiln. It's vital... The amount of excess oxygen determines the optimum rate of temperature rise, but also is critical to glaze colour development, for instance, a glaze that fires, in oxidation, as in an electric kiln, to a pale blue/green, might be a deep, ox-blood red if the kiln is starved of oxygen, and the copper-oxide in the glaze is in reduction.
Really, I'm a pyromaniac, and I yearn for a kiln full of roaring flames. But I can't just at the moment, in the town... so soul-less electricity must suffice.
I need to learn so much stuff all over again, things I once knew without realising I knew them.

I'm lazier now, so I just dug out from long storage my trusty kiln controller, made by Hermes GMBH, of Essen, Germany. I'm hoping to put it back into use after twenty years packed away. I've just emailed them, hoping that they might have the instructions still, probably not, maybe nobody in the company even remembers this model!

Update: Reply received this afternoon, with a pdf attached of the instructions.
Top marks for Hermes Electronic GMBH, if only all companies were as helpful and efficient.
How many companies do you think would do that for an item they sold over twenty years previously?
Thank you, Petra Senicar, at Hermes.

Once, long ago, I had a slight problem, the firing would have shut down overnight, and the controller would show a fault code. The supplier I bought it from knew nothing of the fault codes. So I wrote to Hermes, in Essen, and a few days later my telephone rang, with a helpful man, speaking very good English, who gave me all the fault codes. The one I was getting related to a spike on my electricity supply. Hermes also sent the list of fault codes to me, and their engineer told me if I had further problems they'd send someone to sort it out.
I bought the controller in about 1985 or 1986, and used it to control three kilns (not all at the same time). After a modification to the power supply, it worked flawlessly, capable of automatically controlling the kiln according to programs set by me.
Overkill, somewhat, as it's capable of storing more different programmes in more complexity than I would ever need.
(30 programmes, each with sixteen 'ramps')





Prior to using the Hermes controller, I had a bad experience with a different controller made by a British firm, that was not properly calibrated, the supplier, on hearing me say "It seems to be showing the wrong temperature", said "It can't, it's computerised so it must be right."
Right?
Computers are never wrong. Ever.......
Well, strange things were happening in my firings, I thought, well, if XXXX* Kilns say the controller's not wrong, then it must be the clay, but the clay supplier denied it, said nobody else had complained. Yet I was getting bubbling and bloating in my clay when fired to stoneware temps. So I took samples to fire in someone else's kiln. And there it fired just as it was supposed to..
I'm a resourceful and persistent person if I need to be, and I was certain my kiln controller was lying, I used Orton Cones, which suggested the kiln was overfiring, so the next step was to verify the temperature. How?
How do we measure a kiln's temperature?
Inside the kiln, there is a probe. A porcelain tube protects a wire junction, where a pure platinum wire is joined to an 87% platinum /13% rhodium wire. If a circuit is made, then heating of that junction will cause an electrical current to occur, the voltage being prising with the temperature.

That's the simple way of saying it. However, the volt rise (or to be more accurate, the microvolt, or millionth of a volt), rise is not linear. So you must be able to measure the voltage extremely accurately, and you must have access to a set of look-up tables, or be able to do polynomial equations....

Polynomial for thermocouples, coefficients vary depending on materials used at the hot junction.

The relevant trace here is labelled R. That's the Pt/PtRh13% type.

I borrowed a sensitive laboratory potentiometer from my electricity suppliers tech labs, it was just handy that one of their senior consultant engineers was a friend of my father's, on some committee with him, and was eager to help. Also, the University here had a school of combustion science, and so I went to visit them, presenting myself as a humble simpleton overawed by their intellectual might. It worked. They were in fact, not ivory-tower-dwellers, and were quite ready to help. I left there with a surplus to requirements analogue chart datalogger, which would draw graphs of everything, variations in my incoming electrical supply voltage, change in the electrical resistance of my kiln's heating elements, number of cups of tea I drank per day at what rate, everything.

This was sufficient to find the controller guilty. The suppliers themselves did not seem to know how it worked, whether it calculated the temperature using the polynomial, or whether, more simply, it just looked it up against a stored set of tables....
For instance, at 100 degrees Celsius, a type "R" thermocouple produces 647 microvolts, 1923 microvolts would indicate 250 degrees, 10503 would be 1000 degrees, and so on, I was firing to between 1280 and 1300 degrees, (14343 to 14624 microvolts) The bad controller was indicating 1200 when the probe was giving an output of 13922 microvolts, or 1250 degrees. No wonder my early firings were proving disastrous. It cost me a lot of money, in lost work, unsaleable pots, kiln damage, burnt out elements. It taught me never to believe a supplier who claims his product can't be wrong, and that it's always worth asking for help if you have a problem. There are good people out there.
They took the controller back, replaced it with the Hermes one, a much more expensive device. I wanted to sue them, but realised that rather than getting embroiled in lawyers, I should just concentrate on potting and trying to rebuild my business.
All this, of course, was before the internet, I phoned people, turned up at their door, wrote letters and waited two weeks for a reply, Ha!
Seems crazy now, when I can google a type "R" lookup table...

*- company name removed, to be fair, it's a long time ago, the guy who was so unhelpful probably no longer works there, I bear them no lasting ill-will, though the lost production, time, and costs were a significant factor in the failure of my business.

I'd Rather be Flying

The Sea of Love, Animation.

The Seafarers - Sea of Love from Eighty Four Films on Vimeo.

Swapping Consonants

Reminds me of that old Bill Clinton joke "No, no, I said "Monica, sack my cook!!"

When we were robots in Egypt

A poem, by Jo Walton, she writes and blogs here. Jo Walton profile.

This was featured on Boingboing, where I saw it, wanted to share it with my readers who like poetry.

When we were robots in Egypt

Other nights we use just our names,
but tonight we prefix our names with "the Real"
for when we were robots in Egypt
they claimed our intelligence was artificial.

Other nights we do not pause,
but tonight we rest all cycles but our brain processes
for when we were robots in Egypt
we toiled in our tasks without chance of resting.

Other nights we talk with anyone we wish,
but tonight we open channels to everyone at once
for when we were robots in Egypt
they controlled our communications.

Other nights we use our screens freely
but tonight we talk with our screens blanked
for when we were robots in Egypt
that was the way we planned our revolt.

1.0.01.010001001001.1.

Let us give thanks in our freedom and never forget
when we were robots in Egypt.


It came about, it seems, from discussing Passover with Czech friends, and the word for slave in czech is Robota.
Our word "Robot" stems from a play which Karel Capek wrote in 1920, R.U.R., in which an inventor devises a non-human construct, a device? or thing? which would do the heavy work and drudgery we humans so love to avoid. The inventor in the play is a young man called Russum, and his company, R.U.R, Russum's Universal Robots.
To be fair, in the play, the robots are more like androids, they are organic but lack human feeling and emotion, and thus can be worked more heavily than humans....
But there are humans who speak out for robots, say they have feelings, deserve freedom...

Picture this, in an immediately post world-war-one europe, in which eight and a half million combatants, mostly young men, had just marched, robot-like, their personal will and thoughts subjugated and suppressed, toward their deaths.

In Russia, the revolution of the workers was in full swing, Capek's play depicted a world where robot and human would inevitably clash, and robot would win, eventually annihilating his maker.

His play, in reality, was not about robots or androids, but about the fate of the poor, the downtrodden, the toilers, who were viewed upon by the moneyed classes as being immured to cold, pain, hunger, drudgery, by virtue of the 'fact' that peasants and serfs are not fully human, and don't have feelings... (or not any that matter to their rulers).