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Anonymous09/24/26, 02:46No.3009291Guidance about pottery with limited tools
I've been trying my hand at a kind of pottery dorodango(very smooth mud ball, basically) for a bit now, without any dedicated pottery tools since I don't have any and just picked this up out of nowhere.
I got local clay from dirt using buckets & cloth, then molded it with my hands, burnished with a metal spoon and fired it on the coals of a charcoal grill, surrounded by aluminum foil.
I've tried several times to make a full ball, and though the molding, drying and burnishing go off mostly without issue, when it comes to firing all but my most primitive piece have broken apart. I've decided to try out a disk, figuring that the reduced internal volume could help trap less moisture and reduce odds of explosion, but since this is a decently labor intensive process, I'd like to ask you guys for any tips you have to help prevent cracking. Is there some method that I can use to make it less likely to explode? Could my clay + grog use some additive? Maybe I should poke some holes into it (though it would ruin the aesthetics)? Maybe sundrying it for a week? Any tips, really.
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Anon09/24/26, 05:48No.3009298
It’s likely exploding due to gasses on the inside. Most of the time it’s because the clay is not dry enough and the heat boils the water and the steam causes it to explode. Something like that could take quite a long time to dry. I wouldn’t be surprised if the water has a harder time getting out due to the surface finish but idk if that would actually happen. The way we tell if clay is still wet at the studio if to put it to our cheeks to see if it is cool to the touch. Leaving it somewhere dry or maybe putting it in a sealed container with a lot of silica gel packets would help. Putting it in an oven set right below waters boiling point could also work.
Probably the best way to save your pieces though would be to not fire them. I don’t know what the grill would do frankly. I’ve heard some potters fire their burnished pieces at low cones like 018, but that’s still over a thousand degrees Fahrenheit. Maybe grill coals get that hot idk. Does your firing process noticeably change the claybody you have?
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Anon09/24/26, 06:10No.3009299
Get a pottery lathe.
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Anon09/24/26, 06:27No.3009301
Pottery tools are basically paperclips and popsicle sticks. To fire clay it must be totally and absolutely dry and you said nothing about racking and letting it dry so I imagine that's your issue. Also all dirt is not created equal, I don't believe good clay mud exists everywhere, just like mor all beaches have sand and not all sand is nice.
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Anon10/10/26, 16:15No.3010986
Another thing you could try is putting the ball into a vacuum chamber for a few days to draw the moisture out, then burnishing it and drying it in the oven previous to firing. If you need water to burnish it add as little as you can and do the vacuum and oven cycle again afterwards, what you want is to get all the water content out of the center which being so far from the surface might take a long time
You could also fire a smaller (dried) ball and keep layering more clay on top until you reach the desired thickness, or forego the clay core entirely and start out with a metal or glass ball or something that can take the heat and make just the outside clay instead