Ron Roy: the Pottery Glaze doctor.

Right from his early days (60+ years ago), Ron was looking for a canvas on which he could apply a pottery glaze. Creating pottery with thicker or thinner rims would dictate which glaze would go where. 
In his earliest days, information of raw materials was hard to come by, so potters often had to guess their way through recipes. Then calculating the percentages of different ingredients to assure that there is not too much or too little of either a flux (an oxide that lowers the melting temperature of refractory oxides), or a stabilizer (alumina) or a glass former (silica or borax) in a pottery glaze, never turned out the same two times in a row. 
Ron wanted to visualize the inside of a ceramic glaze, so when he got his first computer, a new world opened for him. This experience of getting to know glaze making and to break the uncertainty and thumb sucking to obtain good and stable glazes became reality when Tony Hansen from Digital fire fame created the first Insight program. 
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It was with this program that Ron Roy became the glaze doctor, helping potters around the globe to fix glazing problems and to obtain sturdy clay and glazes. 
Being a person that believe you have to give to receive, his contributions to Clayart, is (at age 86) to this day still unmeasurable.

The pottery book Mastering Cone 6 glazes, with co-author John Hesselberth is back on the market after it was first published in 2002. This book took the potters market by storm and almost every potter that worked at ^6 developed glazes from there; learning about the importance of stable and food safe glazes. ( scroll down for video)

Mastering Cone 6 glazes By John Hesselberth and Ron Roy

This book offers something different from what potters find in other pottery glaze books. John and Ron discuss what stable and durable ceramic glazes mean. 
They give basic information about buying, storing, weighing, and mixing pottery glazes. 
They teach you how to test for stability, clay, and glaze fit on clayware, resistance to flaws like too soft glazes, causing scratch marks on dinnerware. How to resist glazes on kitchenware to become damaged by acids and alkalis, and how to prevent pottery breaking apart due to terminal shock.
They teach potters how to fit a glaze and prevent shivering ( which will result in glass flakes on pottery), dunting and crazing of pottery.
The book concludes with stoneware, porcelain, and specialty glazes and how to develop your own glazes. 

​Online Glazing with Ron Roy on Insight

Now he brings us Glazing with Ron Roy. After years of personal exploration of glazes, helping other potters to improve and fix faulty glazes, he offers an online class which will allow you to be directly in conversation with him about remedying glazes. Ron will show you step by step  examples of how to use the free Insight program, a frontrunner of the Insight-live program. He will also share with you the follow-up Ron Roy Glaze book in PDF format. 

Glaze book in PDF format by 
Ron Ro content list
​​Expansion coefficients
Limit formulas
Typical Analysis - Glaze materials
Typical Analysis - Feldspars & Spodumenes
Analysis for selected Frits
Typical analysis - clays
The oxides
Glaze defects
Firing Up
Cooling Down
Glaze Test Preparation
Testing for Fit (expansion / contraction)
Testing clay to see if it will leak
Fixing clay and glaze problems
Molecular Weights
Hazards and All Glazes Leach - safety
Recommended Texts and web sites

  #glazes #calculatingglazes #stablepotteryglazes #foodsafeceramics #durablepottery 
#virtualpotteryclasses #potterye-course #TeachinArt

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