Summer 2012 Pottery

My experiments with pottery have been productive, though somewhat limited.  In late spring of this year I came down with a case of Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever.  This set me back in all of my projects a good month and a half and left me lacking motivation for most of the summer.  In spite of this set back, I was able to have two separate pottery firings.  The first one ended in tragedy when the durecho of 2012 came hurtling in and drenched all three pots.  In the second firing, I lost two pots to hairline cracks, but the third one turned out well.  The cracks may have been caused by impatiences on my part.  I may have been too eager to heat the pots and caused heat-shock.  It also was somewhat gusty that day.

Although I forget the exact temperatures I measured with the infrared thermometer, all of the pots did become glowing red-hot, and they all definitely exceeded the minimum temperature needed to induce spalling.  Though they did reach this temperature, I immediately allowed the fire to burn down, so they did not stay that hot for more than 5 or 10 minutes.

My one uncracked pot for 2012 is the largest pot I've ever produced.  I haven't measured its volume yet, but it holds at least twice the volume of liquid of the largest pot I produced last year.  I seemed to be appropriately thin-walled, but is very solid and only has one or two small superficial external flakes from spalling.

So far I have been able to use the pot to boil water three times with no problems.  The third time I added a lot of rice and ended up with a weeks worth of cooked rice.  It was slightly smokey flavored, but was otherwise quite good.