He posted several replies, one of which included the following which I felt was pure & simple & worth hanging on to.

O.K. besides all that, I have an answer for your aims for your thesis.......
These are the Factors that need to be taken into account, very simply put as boiled down as I dare, in the order I feel are most important.
By the word "consistency", I mean the same thing every time.

1. Consistency of firings.

2. Consistency of any and all raw materials used for glazes.

3. Accuracy of glaze recipes.

3. Consistency of clay bodies, including engobes and slip recipes.

4. Consistency of water.

5. Consistency of combinations of all of the above.

I'm thinking HARD about it, and this is my boiled down Maple Sugar Answer.

ANY change in # 1-5 is going to, as your thesis question mentioned, "change crystalline results so drastically."

Now it gets really hard, and in fact infinite.
No one in the world is doing the EXACT same thing with this.

We have common traits, but just as our human DNA is something like 99.99% identical, just look around and see if you can actually believe that.

In the way that The Creator can so drastically manipulate .01% to such extremes and diversity, such as it is with this.

WE are not in complete control, but we are gifted with the ability to create a circumstance of growth to occur.

Much as a farmer plants a seed and waters it in tilled soil, the corn will grow.
And sometimes some stalks are short, and some are oddly HUGE, the objective of the farmer is consistency, year after year, as much as he or she can, no matter what it takes if it is possible to be done.

Welcome to rolling out of the sack at 4 a.m.
That's a tough haul.

If the circumstance changes, so will we, so will the corn, and so will crystalline firings, more so than anything else I have ever experienced.

Crystals are fickle.

How fickle are they?

It's like riding a unicycle on a dental floss tight wire over a wilderness of razor blades, or standing barefoot on a giant watermelon seed on a linoleum floor!

Keep at it.

If you slip off the giant seed (no pun intended), you can come hang around with the rest of us on the floor for awhile, then we'll se how long the next guy or gal can ride the seed after we all give him or her a leg up onto the slippery thing.

Now it gets difficult for you.
Take my 5 variables, break them down a bit into smaller component parts and build from there.

 

Word Sister, word.
Koz
 

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Phil Hamling

376 County Route 1

Warwick, NY, USA 10990