An older post.... no longer true

As you know Gerstley Borate is no longer available, we have 3 substitutes we have tested and with feedback from our customers we are getting to have a feel for the problem.

Cadycal is a calcium borate , it seems to work best when you were using GB to do something in a glaze. Use 70% of the original amount of GB in your glaze. It does things like break and create a visually uneven color.

Laguna Borate is most useful as an auxiliary melter in a high fire glaze. So when a cone 6 glaze calls for 20% GB substitute Laguna Borate one to one (or less). Major complaint Laguna Boring! It just lays there and makes a boring glaze, great if that is what you want.

Dal Tile's GB substitute from Mexico, we are still waiting for a sample.

Even Older notes on GB......

(from Digitalfire)

Laguna Borate looks like the answer to vanishing Gerstley Borate 

April 14, 2000 

After 3+ months and scores of glaze tests, we've come up with a blended material that looks like the best possible sub for Gerstley Borate. 

You may have heard about Cadycal and other raw materials being tested to take the place of Gerstley, but we found that where those materials work some of the time, Laguna Borate works in virtually every glaze we tested Raku, low and high fire. And guess what, the blended Laguna Borate is actually cheaper than Cadycal! CADYCAL has been discontinued.

The next step is for you to test Laguna Borate in your glazes and your firing conditions. To make this as painless as possible, we re offering the following special as advertised in the May issue of Ceramics Monthly. If you have any questions, drop me a line at jpacini@lagunaclay.com. 

February 18, 2000

The last two weeks have seen some extraordinary activity in terms of Gerstley sales. The general reaction to the end of Gerstley mining can best be described as panic, in response to which Laguna has been forced to adopt a revised sales approach. 

The "first-come-first-served" plan that Laguna announced five weeks ago is clearly not working. Our hope was that customers would buy enough Gerstley to sustain their production through the time needed to develop and test substitutes for the material. However, it appears that a small number of customers are trying to stockpile as much gerstley as possible for their own economic gain, while others are purchasing a lifetime supply, leaving the majority at risk of not getting material essential for near-term production. 

Given both this "run on the Gerstley bank" and Laguna s declining supply, our singular goal at this point is to be as fair as possible to ALL Laguna customers. Our intention at this point is to provide Laguna customers a quantity of gerstley equal to a six months supply, or one-half the quantity you purchased from us in 1999. It is our hope that Laguna distributors will manage their supplies in a similar manner. Based on the state of our current research, a suitable Gerstley substitute should be available well before the depletion of a six months supply.