at home i throw on a brent, at the university they have creative industries wheels, i believe CI wheels to be the kia to brent's volvo. i had a CI in my studio which blew a fuse while centering about 20 pounds. i wasn't even aware that they had fuses, in ten years i have never had to do a thing to my brent. so i switched it out with a new one they got last year and it couldn't even handle the torque of twenty soft pounds of clay. i don't care what model it is if you drop $900 on a wheel it shouldn't blow fuses or bog down from 20 pounds of clay. needless to say i hauled my trusty(and heavy) brent up to school, much better. i apologize if you're the happy owner of a CI(or a kia,)just my opinion, rant over.
i had about 500 pounds of clay mixed up using the mixer at the school, which by the way is way more work than the slip method. its aged for a couple months and is still pretty crappy, but i managed to get some platters and dinner plates done with it today. i used the same formula as my woodfire but add about 1% yellow ochre which warms up the the glazes a bit. they only had greenstripe at the school(i use hawthorn35&50) so i substituted that as my fireclay not realizing that it comes as something like 200 mesh, which means butter smooth clay. this is also the main component they've been using for the beginners clay which means they've been trying to teach students to throw with a clay that stands up like porcelain. i may have to remedy that.
here are a bunch of pots waiting for the trip back to the wood kiln.
all these pots(minus the white casserole) are over a year old. they're with my old clay body that i used pre-raw glazing. i've been saving them wondering what to do but now they'll find life in the reduction kiln.
here is the ceramics/sculpture yard. its a mess. i have a couple pallets of bricks back in the corner over there that are going to become a salt kiln.
so long for now.
2 comments:
I think your students are lucky to have you looking out for them. It's been my experience that the biggest problem with clay programs is the lack of decent clay. Give'em some tooth!
I've just reclaimed some clay and instead of pugging it, I just wedged it really soft and I think it's much better than the pugged stuff. It threw like a dream. The pugged clay needs to rest a week or so and then is better.
Thanks for the idea, that small change in a few inches would probably give me enough room to get in there. I'm always on the lookout for big shallow wide plastic bowls/or bins that you could fill with slip when you needed something wide, they are just hard to find.
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