“When you know stuff you can do stuff”. This is a quote from a very prolific ham radio homebrewer, Pete Juliana, callsign N6QW. It is possible that he has built more homemade transceivers of unique designs than anyone else.
In high school I read a lot of books and skimmed dozens of others. In total I believe that this was more than 100 books. Most were from The Detroit Public Library but also included my local library, my school library, and a bunch of books I bought with money earned from singing.
I tended towards books that were technical but not at the level of Engineering. Although I did take some engineering books home to look through.
This voracious appetite for ceramic reading did not stop until the late 1970’s. When at the Archie Bray Foundation visiting I read through everything I could in the library and skimmed many other books. What I learned in that library helped me be successful at many things a few of which I can track.
But it is not just books that have value to read. Instruction manuals for kilns have a lot of important information. The Orton Foundations literature on temperature, cones, and other measurement devices is very helpful. Omega Engineering used to have a product application book that had a bunch of basic knowledge on thermocouples that I have found useful.
The AP Green book on bricks was a great read. It informed how I built kiln walls. There was something called The Gas Consumption Handbook that I enjoyed.
These days of instant information people love to ask questions online. The amount of laziness and lack of reading is palpable. Page 32 of the latest Skutt Manual has the Error codes. Before you ask a question here you should at least have the courtesy to check the manual.
This does not mean that I won’t answer these questions that should be easy to find answers to. Nor does it mean that sometimes things don’t fall through the crack of our acquisition of knowledge.
But when you know stuff you can do stuff. Most of my new ideas require knowledge in order for me to evaluate them and then to implement them. In Studio Ceramics a good place to start is a basic textbook as it can provide a framework for further knowledge and gets you started with a broad understanding. I suggest Nelson’s “Ceramics: A Potter’s Handbook” any edition. The pictures are better in the newer additions. They can be found for less than $10.
<\/p>\r\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
“When you know stuff you can do stuff”. This is a quote from a very prolific ham radio homebrewer, Pete Juliana, callsign N6QW. It is possible that he has built more homemade transceivers of unique designs than anyone else. In high school I read a lot of books and skimmed dozens of others. In total […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1306","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ceramics-","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/louiskatz.net\/wpt\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1306","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/louiskatz.net\/wpt\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/louiskatz.net\/wpt\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/louiskatz.net\/wpt\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/louiskatz.net\/wpt\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1306"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/louiskatz.net\/wpt\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1306\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1309,"href":"https:\/\/louiskatz.net\/wpt\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1306\/revisions\/1309"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/louiskatz.net\/wpt\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1306"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/louiskatz.net\/wpt\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1306"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/louiskatz.net\/wpt\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1306"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}