Changes to Tucker 6-50 Clay

This is a repost of a blog written and posted by Tuckers Clays

Clay Bodies and Adjustments - Effective Immediately

Those of you that have been potting for many years will be familiar with some of the following information. However, over the last several years, a boom in ceramics has welcomed many new customers to our industry, so some background is mixed in with the following announcement.

Clay materials are organic, mined materials, and in many cases not mined specifically for the pottery industry. As such, they change some over time, depending on where in the mine that particular batch of <ball clay, kaolin, fire clay, etc…> was dug from. As such, we test. A LOT. Raw materials will change slightly in colour, particle size, shrinkage, and absorbency. Your expectation is that the finished clay that you purchase from us remains consistent….so we take our test results, make small tweaks to our recipes, and then test our finished clays. We make every effort to ensure that any changes to your clay bodies are as imperceptible as possible.

This is a note about MCS and 6-50 in particular. The fired results for both bodies have always been quite similar, although they each had different recipes. 6-50 was developed by Stratford Clay Supply many years ago, and was based on Tile 6 kaolin. MCS has also been around a very long time, and was based on EPK kaolin. One kaolin is whiter than the other, the other is more plastic, so each recipe complimented those raw materials with other materials that would bring the overall recipe into alignment with the finished colour, texture, and glaze fit that one would expect of a typical cone 6 porcelain.

With the challenges in sourcing EPK over the last several years, minor adjustments have been being made to both bodies, and slowly, organically, the two clay bodies began becoming more and more similar.

The final result, as it turns out, is that now the recipes for MCS and 6-50 are actually identical. It does not make sense to have 2 clay bodies that differ only in name, and not in their formula. Therefore, we will no longer produce a clay called 6-50.

If you have any questions about this, please do not hesitate to contact us.

Sincerely,
The Team at Tucker’s