I've found Bentone-EW has incredible suspending power compared with VeeGum or bentonite. And best of all it doesn't lump together in cold water as bentonite does.

After reading about Bentone-EW on John Tilton's blog, I bought a pound from Trinity Ceramics in Texas.  Sayed Abbas at US Pigment says he will soon be carrying this product as well.    http://www.tiltonpottery.com/life_cycle.php

http://trinityceramic.com/     http://www.uspigment.com/chemicals.shtml

The Bentone-EW manufacturer says this type of bentonite is "highly beneficiated" which is usually a code-word for subjecting their raw bentonite to some sort of chemical processing after it is mined.  The suspending power is 15 times that of ordinary bentonite.

Manufacturers PDF Information Sheet     Digitalfire page on Bentone-EW

Ferro Frit makes CM-941, a beautiful but problematic ^06 all-in-on leaded cadmium sulfide frit.  Add 2% bentonite to suspend this frit and it fires into a bubbly black mess.  In the past I've had to "suspend" this frit with 4% xanthan gum.

So instead of using 2% VeeGum bentonite, I successfully suspended this all-frit glaze using 0.2% Bentone-EW.

As you can see in the photo below, the miniscule 0.2% of Bentone-EW does affect the color somewhat, but at least it's still red rather than foamy matte black.

Trinity Ceramic Supply says Bentone-EW "is not a big seller", which I can easily understand. A single pound of Bentone-EW is sufficient to suspend at least 500 pounds of all-frit glaze.

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Thanks for the tip norm. I have suspected that regular bentonite changed some of my gazes. Next time I mix new batches I will test.

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