These maybe the last cone 5/6 tests that I do. I won’t say I’ll never return to cone 5/6 because who knows what the future holds. These were fired to cone 5.
This is my sandstone clay along with some red clay from the ditch beside the house. The sandstone clay will probably end up being my regular clay body. It’s about half sand, but it’s easy to process, doesn’t clump up on me, and dewaters nicely. The sand just settles out, so it’s not hard to remove. Plus, I think it’s low enough in iron that I can get away with reduction firing it, but we’ll see about that soon.
The red clay is hard to process, as it doesn’t want to settle. Add things to help it settle, and it gels like no clay I’ve seen. This batch took literally months to dewater enough to put on cement board. However, feels really nice and is nice to throw.
The red clay was mixed with nepheline syenite and the sandstone clay was mixed with mahavir feldspar. These were the first tests I’ve done with the mahavir. Since it’s a potassium feldspar, it doesn’t flux as well at cone 5 as neph sye. Which is shown in these tests. It will be a nice cone 10 flux though if I need to add one.
And then of course the one lonely reclaim test.
| Sandstone w/Mahavir | Porosity |
| 7 | 4.6 |
| 10 | 3.3 |
| 12 | 3.3 |
| Red Clay w/Neph Sye | |
| 6 | 2 |
| 8 | 1.3 |
| 10 | 1.2 |
| Reclaim | 4.1 |
