Golden Sphere is a glaze chemistry workbench for the studio potter.

Type a recipe as raw materials and batch weights. Golden Sphere turns it into the oxide unity formula — the Seger formula — then tells you what that glaze will actually do in the kiln: how it melts, what surface it gives, how opaque it is, what colour it gives, and whether it will fit your clay body or craze. Every answer names the oxides that drove it, so you get the reason, not just the number.

FORMULA AND LIMITS
• Batch to unity formula, with the three Seger columns, the flux split, Si:Al, R2O:RO, loss on ignition and the fired weight analysis
• Every oxide checked against the published limit range for your target cone, with the distance outside it and what that direction does

WHAT THE GLAZE WILL DO
• Melt read as a ratio against what your cone actually demands: underfired, stiff, matured, fluid, or running off the pot
• Surface from Si:Al, alumina and the flux split — gloss, satin, matte or dry, with the cause of a matte named
• Opacity from tin, zircon and titanium; colour from iron, cobalt, copper, chrome, manganese, nickel and rutile, read against your kiln atmosphere — and it names any condition a colour needs but is missing
• Fault risks — crawling, pinholing, running, settling, dry edges — each with its driver

THERMAL FIT
• Glaze expansion computed from the fired formula and compared against your clay body
• Crazing, neutral, good fit or shivering, with the difference stated
• The three oxides carrying most of the expansion, so you know which lever to pull
• The same glaze checked against every body, so you can see which one it would fit

FIRING SIMULATION
Peak temperature is not what matures a glaze. Heat work is.
• Build a schedule from ramps, holds and atmospheres, and see the firing your kiln can really run: rates it cannot hold are clamped to what the elements deliver
• The cone your firing reaches at peak, and the total heat work including the cooling tail, where glazes keep maturing
• Energy estimate, time to peak, total time, and a cone pack prediction
• A risk timeline pinned to the temperatures where it matters: quartz inversion, incomplete burnout, trapped carbonate release, blistering, early reduction, long soaks, and cooling too fast or too slow
• Preview any recipe in any schedule and see its predictions recomputed at the heat work that firing really delivers

CORRECTIONS
Pick the fault you have — crazing, shivering, running, underfired, crawling, pinholing, too glossy, too matte, needs opacity — and get three concrete batch changes. Each shows the exact material moves, the before and after of every headline number, and one sentence naming what improved and what it cost. Apply one as a new recipe, or over the original.

BLENDS
Line blends between two recipes, triaxials between three. Every cell is fully analysed and mapped by expansion, Si:Al, melt, surface, or how many oxides sit outside their limits, with the boundaries marked where the result changes. Save a cell as a recipe, or take it straight to a test tile.

TEST TILES
Photograph what came out of the kiln and record what you saw: surface, opacity, crazing, running, defects, colour. It scores that against what it predicted and explains the disagreements from what you recorded — a thicker application, more heat work than the schedule promised, an atmosphere it was not formulated for. Then it hands the observed fault straight to the corrections. Export any tile as a result card to your photos.

IN THE BOX
47 raw materials with full oxide analyses, 11 clay bodies, the Orton cone table, the limit tables, and starter recipes and firing schedules to take apart. Add your own materials and bodies, or edit and reset the ones that ship.

Choose between the English & Turner and Appen expansion models and every fit reading recomputes at once. Set your test batch size and every weigh-out is shown in grams.

For potters who want to know why a glaze did what it did — and what to change.

Glimmer Reel Media

Additional Information