Extruding Coils When Making Pottery

Video Transcript

" Hi! This is Roy Stringfellow for expertvillage.com. We’re going to talk about and demonstrate how to make coils now from an extruder. An extruder is just simply an object of a piece of equipment that make coils for you. In the last segment, you notice that making coils sometimes lacks consistency if you’re only doing it by hand. By using an extruder, you have consistency throughout your entire coil production. So what we need is something like this, which is an industrial clay extruder. First thing that you want to do is determine what size of die you want your coil to be. Here’s an example of two dies. I will select this one, which is a little larger than that one. There are also larger dies. It works just like a clay gun or something like that. Next thing I do is spray a little WD40, the magic fluid, into the tube of this because it helps the clay to slide through. Place the die on one end like this, and then you’re ready to insert the clay. I have a piece of clay that’s already been in the extruder, so we’re going to go ahead and place it back in. Since it’s not quite full and complete, what we’re going to do is insert another piece of the same clay body. We’ll prepare that simply by trying to size it to the tube of the extruder itself. We have something that’s fairly close. It needs a little bit more skinning up here. That’ll do it. Then we just simply drop it into the tube after it gets skinny enough, and it’s ready to go. Then you take the mechanism, that’s the gun part, place it on top, tighten her down, and you’re ready to make coils. The coil size that you get is going to be the size that’s coming out this end right here. It’s a real simple process. You simply take this lever, make sure your plunger is in and squeeze it out. Now you can see, compared to the last section, you have a coil of clay that is exactly the same dimension kind of ready to go. It doesn’t have any mess ups on it at all. The only mess up is going to be when we try to attach it to something else. That’s going to be able to make a sizable pot as we begin to put this stuff together. There you go. "