Hey guys today, I'm going to show you how to check change the specific gravity of your glaze.
Now, what is specific gravity? It's basically how thick or how dense your glazes. So I have, this is like a base white, a matte white glaze, and it is at a 1.5, 6 1 5 density. And so I like to get it right at the two liters.
I always do this in metric because there's so much easier to calculate. I like to get it right at the two leaders, mark, and then weigh it on the scale. But before we go there, you can go down with specific gravity. You can make your glaze less dense at any point while you're mixing it by just adding water and mixing it up. But it's only at the beginning that you can make your glaze more dense. You can increase specific lab gravity only at the beginning. I want to show you, this is a white Hanson, white Hanson clear that is separated. So this has been settling for a while. And I, I don't know if you can see here, but it's basically one leader of glaze. And then it's like a 0.3, five of water on top. You see that clear right there. That's the water.
So if I, I don't know what the specific gravity is of this right now, but what I could do to make it the specific gravity go higher is I could right now while it settled, I could get that water out, take a little tiny cup or something and bail it out little by little with trying to not disturb that the glaze elements that are down there that have separated from the water.
So once I do that, I can raise that maybe 10.0 a lot, a significant amount by just taking out that water. In fact, I just did that with this glaze to get it up to 1.56. Okay. So with that out of the way, the only way to get this one to go up would be to take that water out.
This one, I can't take it. I can't get this specific gravity to go up now because everything's been mixed up. I've already glazed a few pots with this one.
So now the only way to go with this guy is down so down. We'll go by adding water. Okay. So first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to measure the specific gravity of this one.
And what I'm going to do for that is I'm going to get this water right up to the two later mark. Boom. Okay. And I'm going to make sure this is zeroed out on the scale. I do this in grams and I do this in milliliters just because it makes it a lot easier. Okay. So I'm in a zero out. This is the same type container at 67 ground grams.
I'm Zeroing it out now. It's zero. Now it's a negative 68. And now when I put this on there, it's going to, it's going to tell me how much this whole thing weighs minus the container. So this is at 3 0 1 2. Let me write that down Somewhere 3, 0 1, 2. And now we know how, how, and this is right at 2000 milliliters.
So I'm going to do 3 0 1, 2 over 2000. And that gives me a specific gravity of anybody do it in their head. Okay. 3 0 1, 2 divided by 2000 equals oops, 3 0 1, 2 divided by 2000 equals 1.506. Now I want this one to be around. I want it to be 1.46 something. Cause I did my last batch at 1.56. I'm going to do this one at 1.46.
So let's just see what we can get here. Okay. Almost there. So I just do it a little bit at a time, taking a little bit out of that high consistency and then diluting a little bit with new water and then giving it a little stir and doing the math again. I'm sure that there is a way to do this without back and forth, back and forth like this. But my math skills are not sufficient at the moment to do that. 2 9 3, 2 divided by 2001 0.466. I'm going to go a little tiny bit more just because I want to get closer to that. 1.6 number might actually be right. 2, 9, 17 divided by 2001 0.458. So that's close to 1.46. I'm going to call that done at 1.46.
That is how you change specific gravity. We went from 1.56 down to 1.46, and being able to change, increase or decrease your specific gravity can help you troubleshoot a bunch of problems related to your glazes, whether it's your base glaze or whether it's your cover glazes. Okay. Have a great day. See you next time.
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