Alright, I bought a fine old reddish-organge Le Creuset pot for cooking chicken in at the thrift store for 50 cents. The outside is in fine condition, but the inside bottom of the pot was abused and almost all the enamel is off the inside bottom, The inside of the pan is an off-white color. This seems the perfect pot to experiment on re enamelling. What enamel should I use and what kind of kiln should I use to bake the enamel on with. If I recall correctly, you said I could enamel it with pottery glaze and then take it to someone with a pottery kiln and bake it in a pottery kiln. Is that correct? or does my aging brain recall errantly?
Hi DC
I wish you could simply send it to me, I would do it for you....but tahn again, you are still waiting for your garlic keeper and the even more elusive garlic baker...
Cast iron is fired at a lower temperature than most ceramics, so one can start with a standard ceramic glaze for 1750 F. which is a common temperature for low maturing glazes and modify it to lower the temperature by a few hundred degrees. Without underestimating your multi facetted talents, I think you should bring it to a local friendly potter rather than trying this yourself.
re the garlic keeper and oven...
One cannot wait for something one did not even deserve in the first place. It will just be a fine surprise one day should one or both of those things magically appear one day when we are both even older and grayer. I guarranty you that I would find it much harder to bear thinking that your fiddling around for something for me kept you from designing even one extra thimble, than I would doing without one of your delightful gifts.
How's the concert hall? Time to rosin up a bow yet?
i am so glad
that i am not the only one that thinks of these things. i have extensive training in ceramics, glassworking and enameling. so of course i dragged home any chipped up finel, dansk and catherineholm piece i found with the idea of repairing them. i tried an enameled stainless catherineholm tray first (poor starting point, stainless is difficult to enamel at all, nevermind repair)with miserable results. normal work on copper is done at 1750 with the piece going into a hot oven then removed as soon as the enamel is melted. this shocked the bejeebus out of the tray and the enamel flaked severely. perhaps steel needs to cool slowly like ceramics. i dont know about ceramic glazes for this purpose. ceramic and various metals have different coefficients of expansion and the different glazes/enamels are specifically formulated with this in mind. i dont know where you are, but in the u.s. thompson is the big maker of enamels.
thrift store pot
i suppose the thing that intrigues me the most about this whole deal is that the aforementioned chicken will be cooked at the thrift store. that's a neat idea.
[please ... don't get me wrong, and don't be upset; i'm not trying to be a wise*ss and belittle your conversation; i actually find it informative and worthwhile. i just couldn't help myself when i saw the sentence structure in your original post!]
respectfully...
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