Some things I'd try: I think your salt is too dilute still, even though the solution is saturated. I bet you want a literal paste of solid salt. Remember that you need a significant amount of flux relative to the thing you're trying to dissolve in the flux, so it's beneficial to have lots and lots of flux volume. Take pottery glazes for example: the total fluxing ingredients are often 50% of the glaze itself. Another thing to note is that table salt melts a little close to the 800c you're firing at. Consider doing a eutectic mix that melts at around 700c? Furthermore, salt is known to be volatile when molten, so you might be losing a significant amount of it when it does evaporate. Perhaps avoid chlorides/halides and favor things like carbonates /alkali oxides. To this end I'm thinking some non-salty soda ash (the alkaline kind made from wood ash) is more beneficial to you. Also consider the role the clay plays. There might be some interaction between your flux and clay minerals that combines to make a sort of permanent glaze which acts as the binder for your pigment (because the salt alone is water soluble and would not be a fast binder)

This is super interesting and I totally understand the frustration and disappointment of trial and error.

That was a heroic quest, Andy! And despite the frustration and repeated disappointment, it turned out to be one of your best videos ever! I can't wait to try it at home.

As ceramics major in art school this is so fascinating to me; you're essentially making oxide wash (which is just 50/50 oxide and gerstely borate). Its just so cool to me that youre such a great potter and youve gone about it in such a different way!

I loved following your quest for knowledge. It’s equally important to find what doesn’t work as it is to find what does. Thankyou for another such video. Your enthusiasm is contagious.

Just discovered this channel. So cool to see a person who is passionate about their hobby/craft and who is willing to share the information in such a positive way.

This might be one of your best videos. Thank you oh so much for not ending it early. I'm sure your on the right path. I personally think the fluxes would have been processed to dry. Either for ease of storage or ease of trade and transport

A spectacular ending, it was clear that the more the salts dissolved, the less it worked, but only you who have the perseverance to try again and again and again, even without us watching. Thank you!

Failure makes a good learning opportunity. Love these investigations!

great video Andy, love seeing the failures and successes all together. i got excited for the salt bush!

I think u might need to heat to a sweet spot between the melting point and the boiling point of the salt for the salt glaze not to boil off maybe. The ending (no spoilers) made a lot of sense too.

Salt and iron both are found in blood.. wonder how that might work. Also, I love that colorful patchwork shirt towards the end. Keep being awesome

Great video. Yesterday I made a paint of ground dry ingredients- borax, galena, manganese dioxide, copper carbonate, clay. Then added water. The result was excellent glaze. Fluxes must be important.

Oh my !!!!! Yay outside foraging for good things!!!

Watched this with my morning coffee. Great start to the day. Thanks Wes.

Kaaplaa! Your insatiable curiosity is adding much to our body of knowledge. Glad you are willing to do so much hard work to figure it out.

I am not a potter (yet) but am a chemist, and a lot of the comments noting a need for more concentrated salt make chemical sense. I think you are on the right track with materials selection; but might need a more complex mixture. When you mentioned that that clay "contaminate" in the playa salt was was so loathe to settle out it made me think that this may be a key ingredient to make things work. Difficulty settling means small particle size, which means a lot of surface area and direct contact with the salt. If you take this and grind it like you do clay, then add pigment and apply as a paste you might have an interesting test indead! Mixing the playa salt and the ash together would be a worthy test as well! I love what you are doing with the channel and look forward to watching your videos, thanks so much!

I loved this video. The logical next step in the scientific investigation from Jeff Coopers research information at the kiln conference.

you might also want to try using sodium silicate(water glass) and Gerstley Borate which are found in nature as well, those are strong fluxes we use in pottery often. A student of mine doing her final project on paper clay, experimented adding 5-10% paper pulp into glazes, and seemed to lower the melting point of the glazes as well. So maybe worth a try to add moist pulp from the native dessert plants/ wood saw dust into your oxides and see if that can work as flux as well. Keep doing these experiments, they are interesting!

I agree its diluted when you mixed the salt Good luck to future experiments

I'm in love with your videos and admire your drive to get it right ! I also love your overall outfit in the 3rd ending ! It make me smile and I thought I would share the smile with you !

Great video! Try calcining the ash from the burnt salt brush to get a cleaner product. You could bake the ash in a container up to a few hundred degrees to get the carbon/impurities to burn off. Calcining the other brines might help too by converting them from chlorides to oxides or something. Thanks Andy! Very informative as always

Seeing all these tests, all these failures gives me great admiration for the ancient potters and their trials and tribulations. You may be exasperated from all or these experiments but it really has opened my eyes to the greatness of the ancient potters. Also now we know why the ancient archeological sites have so much broken pot shards underfoot: failed firings. If only we could hear all of the ancient cuss words that went along with those broken pots! 😂 Pete

This video answers every question I have been asking!

Great experiment! I was trying to figure out why your first try had sputtering and vapor deposition, then it all seemed to make sense when you said the salt granules on that bowel weren't fully dissolved. Although this result lacks the crispness of lines we see in ancient pottery, it is still very intriguing. (1) What do you think of brining the slip as well? It might give more consistent results than trying to keep salt grains in the paint. Could also dust the slip with salt while it is still wet, might affect the surface texture I suppose, finer might be better. (2) What if you used something other than water in the paint? Mineral oil, animal fat, etc., something which salt isn't so readily soluble in. (3) I made a fair bit of black powder in my youth and one thing which really affected the result was to dry mill the ingredients together prior to wetting and granulating. So, maybe try dry milling the salt and pigments together to bring the molecules into close contact then wet with an already saturated brine. I used a ball mill for the GP, sufficiently milling by hand would probably involve more than running the mix through a corn grinder a couple of times - I'd say it would be like adding salt to whatever dry process you'd use to reduce pigment particle size from good enough to extremely smooth (fine).

I admire your tenacity! Edison said " I found 2000 ways to NOT make a light bulb". Or something close to that. Michael

Awesome video! super helpful

excellent effort really enjoy your videos and ty for the time you put in to them.

Awesome stuff thanks for sharing

Thank you from Italy

Loved this video, Andy.

Greatly appreciate and admire you keeping on going to try to make it work !

Your perseverance is inspiring. I actually love your "test" design bowl. The simple grouping of lines, each with its own personality and history, right? Off topic, but I recall hearing that (Navajo?) potters would put dry crushed clay into baskets, and toss the contents repeatedly. The finer clay particles would become airborne and be collected on sheets (skins?) on the ground. After struggling with both wet and dry processing, I'd like to try this....see how it goes. Have you heard of this method?

I love your determination. Great video

Great video and awesome experiments! Looks promising, can't wait to see future videos on this topic! I need to play around with that salt stuff some. That new background is awesome btw!

Andy, I just love your pursuit of experimenting on behalf of all your viewers. I am new to all of this clay finding and out door firing, but I am absolutely fascinated with your videos, and hope to meet you one day and come to one of your workshops.

Great video. I really enjoyed watching you work through the various flux trials. So informative and fascinating.

WOW. soooo many "catch ya next times" really nice video , two thumbs up,. thank you for sharing your experiments and results, and not editing the failures out. thank you tom

Amazing video thank you I learned so so so much.

Great effort......got to watch this again.....so many possibilities......need some luck.

awesome job

try painting the stripes on then putting a strong brine wash on top of the paints to seal them in

We tried the juniper ashes, and I used charred ashy stuff that looked like yours, the results were exact. I am going to try burning a lot more wood and getting a lot cleaner ashes. There is a minoan potter on you tube that uses ash only with his iron oxide, no other fixative. I am sure we may be on to something, and I am ready to be done with these salt questions,.. I want answers and we will let you know our results as well. The copper carbonate we used fumed all of our pots because an air vent was sealed by a bowl. The copper fumes stayed inside the bucket that we fire in and the fume stayed trapped in with the pottery the entire firing. This produced the same fume that your copper did.. Great video, Sir!

Just found your videos, love it. I really like your rainbow shirt, i need to find one for myself!

That colorful outfit is giving me life

What would happen if you added salt to your white slip so that it would melt in similar way? Think it would seal the porous surface to become more 'food safe' ? That could be content for another video of experimental archaeology. Successful or failure, I think would be good to watch.

That's absolutely awesome. Not at all what I was expecting - but in a good way. Keep up the great work.👍👍 Now I'll have to try it out.😁

Great video, thank you for your persistence! Could it be that there are other trace elements in the ash you gathered that are reacting with the salt/oxygen? Perhaps more processing is needed to extract just the flux you're intending, though I don't have an idea of what type of processing may have traditionally been done. Additionally, you said your control was "table salt", which is not NaCl alone, but contains Iodine and possibly anti-clumping agents. I realize you might be using "table salt" to refer to non-iodized, store-bought salt, but that still may contain anti-caking agents. Perhaps that is a variable as well? Something like a sea salt or kosher salt would be closer to pure NaCl or NaCl with other trace elements similar to what you're likely getting from your salt-ash solution. Best of luck in your future experimentations!

Great work Andy, I have loads of salts in my clays. None of the surfaces ever glaze. I like the idea but I think salts fume and can turn white to gray, also with those fine lines the Mimbres painted the lines may get muted together. I’ve heard the Mata Ortiz guys talk a cobalt I think it was made a super black. But it would flake off. I dug a red clay one time and used it as a painting and it turned pitch black but flaked off. It was to pure. 😀

Bravo on your effort!! You'll crack it soon eough

Really interesting. You'd think that once the water in the paint had evaporated, that brine would be back to concentrated pure salt, so perhaps it's just a matter of quantity? there's a lot more salt involved when you use the crystallised form? I don't know anything about pottery or glazes, but I'd be very curious to see what happened if you used as high a percentage of salt you could, and also whether painting a salt paste/crust over the top of the paint did anything.

Good man 👍

Wow chemistry 101 Thanks you so much

Huzzah for experimental archeology!

Groov'n to the music, man.

That's great

Perhaps some type of silicates were involved in these paint mixtures back then?

Excellent series of experiments! Looks like something I would have pursued. 😁 If I can ever so slightly involve a touch of chemistry, what you really need to inspect is how your materials are bonding with your clay, by which I mean what is being exchanged and removed molecularly between the pigments and the flux. Salts are excellent binders to ceramic media of which properties greatly change depending on the combustion environment. They do best with a reduced oxygen atmosphere to neutral, though it's difficult at best to monitor in a wood-fired kiln in open atmosphere. Another common salt to try would be magnesium sulfate, better known as epsom salt. In combination with alumina and phosphoric acid, it was a precursor to firebricks in the early days of the industrial era. Your manganese oxide is considered a catalyst (or flux with pottery) at accelerating the combustion of other materials it is mixed with, as are copper sulphates; you can find the latter primarily as root killer in crystalized form at a hardware/home improvement place or a large bag online through amazon and such. I would probably try a stack of small tiles in your kiln application of choice just to try as many combinations as possible in one go.

Nice video and channel. Amazing hobby. You have a real talent with this. New follower here. Crow✌️

The copper in the paint had a nice "airbrush" effect after firing. Not an authentic replication but still pretty tho

I got quite frustrated with my experimentation. Clearly I am not a research analyst etc. but this has renewed my interest and given me more ideas for my experimentation. I am just trying to get Manganese Dioxide to work. all failure so far but more to follow.

If you want cleaner ash, you need to burn it at a higher temperature for longer. The salt crust from the lake is full of microorganisms, which might be what is producing that colour. Probably good that you didn't taste test it. It looks like you produced red copper (I) oxide in that first test. It even looks a little metallic on the video.

Admiring how you question and pursue answers with great determination, I wanted to ask a question which struck me during this video regarding the use of "table salt"... common table salt usually has additives to keep it from clumping; it's not pure sodium chloride such as pickling salt. Although those additives constitute only about 3% of the product, it can make a big difference when working in the kitchen... could it also make a difference with applications for firing pottery?

Have you ever tried using uric acid (urine) on pots? Seems to me that would be the most readily available thing (in primitive terms). Maybe boiled down (outside of course) till concentrated. Possibly mixed with wood ash? Would make for an interesting video at least.

Yhat clay would be great too it makes me wonder how much better that clay would work with and the end look

I thought the point of a flux was to enable melting of some components of the clay at lower temperatures, something like forming a eutectic mixture with the silica grains. Maybe it just has no effect on the metal oxides at all?

try concentrated ammonium acetate as an additive to all kinds of metal oxide based colors, it even dissolves lead oxides. was used to clean old lead relics. it might improve the melting into the ceramic of all kinds of metal pigment based colors.

Great video, and thank you for being so persistent! Just thinking here... I think it makes sense that salt in solution would not melt so easily, becausebit instill chemically bound to other substances that have a higher melt point. I wonder if you can make crystalline salt from the playa and the saltbrush?

Crystallized salt.

Horrible bowl? Even your experiments are works of art. I think it's cool - can I have it?

Add White vinegar to the water it will help separate the water on top will go clear faster

You need a fritware clay body to make a glaze in low temperature or you can make an Egyptian paste for a starter

Hey Andy, very interesting video, definitely needs a follow up. Also i have a question: what would be the easiest method to make a pot, waterproof enough to allow brine pickling in a primitive setting? is it only achievable in stoneware temps? your video made me wonder if it can be done with a fluxed slip at low temps.

I SO love your approach to finding out how things work!!! I think someone else said this....and I'm so ignorant of all this I hesitate to say anything. But....if one put a brine solution in a clay pot... wouldn't the water evaporate and go through the pot...but leave the salt behind on the inside of the pot? Then one could add that salt to the paints. 🤷‍♀️

Your first attempt that worked well gave blurry lines compared to the sharp lines of the nice olla you were showing next to it where you used clay as a binder, at least that's how it seems on the video. If salt makes the design more blurry this should be detectable on the archaeological pots in the museum and you could find out if they were using it at all.

Maybe wet brush then sprinkle on like sparkles.

Interesting that they call the place a playa (Spanish for beach), instead of a salt flat.

Is the lead in the lead+copper mixture dangerous?

😎 👍🏼

Maybe vinegar might help the clay settle out of the salty lake bed sediment. Probably not but just sayin

Just a thought- did you try using NON iodized salt?

👍

I would add other types of natural flux like bone(calcium) and Feldspar, sulfur. Also mix in seaweed ash, water plants have different minerals composition.

Very cool Andy! Loved the video and your test approach. Been so darn windy here and I’m bogged down with production wheel pottery orders I have NO TIME for primitive pots 😢 back at soon I hope.

A flux plus 10% clay makes a glaze. So you do need to add a little clay to your mix.

Maybe it was the firing I read something once start any of oxy fire then reduce then cool oxy maybe polish the slip on bisque dont think letting it sit long in mix changes I was under the impression let the slip sit long?deflock that glaze?

Can you cover the whole pot in salt as a glaze ? I’m gonna do it in the spring

OMG I think i just thought up a fun and exciting challenge for you Andy and your followers... I have watched I think every one of your youtube videos. many more often then once. The more i practice and follow your guidence the better my hand building skills have developed. One thing I find most noticeable is how the brain remembers. Like the thickness of the pot walls and such. So back to the challenge Would you consider... Building a pot or bowl blindfolded? I'm very curious how that would go. You do very impressive work that has taken you 30+ years to master and your videos make that apparent to those who are trying to follow along with you. So please would you try my challenge? Nothing big or painted or decorated unless you wanted to. Maybe like your "One Coil Challenge" but blindfolded? I dont think i could do it. But could you?

As I watch this I’m taken back to my gma. She made sure I knew how to make lye. I think that’s the problem with your pot ash. Take a bucket and place about 3/4 full of ash (a lot not a little bit like you were doing). Fill the bucket with water. Let that sit undisturbed for three days. Each day skim off the top and discard. On the fourth day you’ll have lye which is the same as baking soda but made from pot ash. We would then use it to make different types of food. Pot ash has to have a lot of ash and it has to have time to leach out of the ash. It can’t be rushed. My aunties sometimes cheat and buy liquid lye which quite frankly doesn’t work the same. You can use mesquite and sage.

Ironoxide becomes a very strong flux in reduction firing.

I wonder how will be the result if use Himalayan pink salt.

I wonder if the salt from pyramid lake nv will work. Its like an alkaline lake

Maybe I’m just too new to pottery, or just dumb…what is the liquid you are using?

I am thinking you had uneven heating in that firing(?)

Would firing it more than once? Or getting it hotter to help melt the metals?

Salt brush looks like rosemary. Are they related?

i wonder if you could use quartz crystal to have it melt into a glassy coating on the pot

Urine salts? Or simulated urine salts? Universally available and easily concentrated and crystallized, relatively speaking. I believe there’s historical record of people communally collecting urine for salt but a quick search didn’t find a citation

Odd question...but I had mentioned finding some beauty clay bluffs with mixed green shale / slate...I was reading about the green shale, and I am curious if you have ever tried grinding something like that down to powder (it's already pretty soft...can pull small pieces to crumbs by hand only), adding some sand, and rehydrating back into clay? I have no clue, obviously, but would like to try it....just thought I'd check with someone knowledgeable before I waste my time! It's just such a perfect blue / green color that I'm drawn to...and logically, I can't see why it wouldn't work, but I'm probably overlooking something that's obvious to you. Also...another random comment...you've got some cool shirts!

Would a pizza oven work as a