Bat Prep For Ceramic Teapot Trimming

Video Transcript

"O.k. so we have our tea pot here and all the various pieces; we've had them in the drying closet for a few days now so that and we've allowed them to dry at about the same rate so all the pieces have a similar moisture level. Here we have the base and there you can see it's popped right off which means it's ready to trim; if, if; if it wasn't ready to trim, if it wouldn't pop off the bat we could do the same process with the wire were you pull it underneath there just to pop it off. Sometimes on these larger pieces they won't pop off so easily but we are nor ready to trim these various pieces and I would like to show you a technique I have for trimming these and getting them, and getting the bat ready to put the clay onto. Any work you can do now to make the centering easier you want to do; so what I like to do is take a pencil and mark my bat with some circles like so. Now they make different kinds of bats for centering; some of them already have circles on them, they also make bat with a felt or a carpet surface so that you can out a pot directly on there and it; and it won't move around on you too much. They also make what's called a giffin grip which is a bat that has three points on it and, and; and it gear and as you close, as; as you move the, the wheel these little gears will move arms in which will hold your pot in place but I'm going to show you how to do it with a regular bat that you would find in any ceramic studio. So what I'm going to do from now once I've put those lines on there is take my tea pot base; a concern with these types of forms is as you can see we have quite a delicate surface up here, however if it's dried out enough so it has enough strength to hold itself up and what I'm going to do is turn the vessel over; and place it on my lines. Now it's harder to see with something like this; where you are but the idea is that you're going to match up with those circles and try to get it as closely on center to begin with as you can, I'm just going to turn the pot to see where we are. O.k. so we've gotten it fairly well on there; o.k. so now we've prepared the bat, we flipped our main piece over; the next thing we're going to do is to secure; to center this, this tea pot on the wheel and then we're going to secure it before we trim; and we're going to do that in the next segment of this exercise."