 Well, the clay-heavy soil is waterlogged and nothing will grow, so I might as well make some lemonade with my lemons. This is experiment #1 of turning the clay into pottery and firing it over a gas hob. Success? Sort of. It's still in one piece, and it has the characteristic tinny ring of pottery when tapped, but I need to filter the clay more to remove large particles. Needs temper added to it to prevent cracking during drying. Also, time to build a pottery wheel. 22 comments
 @jsbarretto I have some massively thick clay soil in my yard, I do quite a bit of amending. This has me curious what I could accomplish with mine. I will be interested where you go with this, if you continue to experiment.  The clay we used for the furnace lining was dug out of the ground, by a couple of us at night. :D https://wiki.london.hackspace.org.uk/view/Project:GingeryFurnace @BillySmith @anniegreens Impressive! Not sure I'm going to be liquidising any metals soon with this setup, but it's awesome that you were able to create this from earth alone. We made an aluminium smelter from a broken vacuum cleaner and a bucket with a hole in it. :D We were following the base instructions from Book 1 of the Gingery series. https://gingerybookstore.com/MetalWorkingShopFromScrapSeries.html When it came to making the casting forms, instead of making them from wood, we were 3d-printing them. :D A chewy combination of ancient and modern techniques. :D Have you come across the Primitive Technology channel? https://www.youtube.com/@primitivetechnology9550 He has some examples of pottery-making and tile-making, using clay-firing. :D One of the first things he made was a clay-firing furnace. :D Filtering of the mud has begun. I've removed large particles with a nylon vegetable bag I had lying around (one of those 'zero waste' ones you get in UK supermarkets but never end up using). Sediment filtering in water seems to be doing the rest of the work. The main difficulty, I think, will be drying the clay out given how damp everything in the west country is right now. Maybe boiling it on the hob at a low temperature is an effective way to remove the excess moisture? I have no idea why I'm using my Thursday night after a day at work and a 3 hour commute to do this, but perhaps it's time to finally chase down that official autism diagnosis. Update: the nylon bag was too fine. I just spent 40 minutes boiling off water only to produce the most intense, pure, texture-of-chocolate intense mud you can imagine, and very little of it at that. Time to find a more coarse sieve. This stuff is the Swiss chocolate of mud, it's glorious in a way I can't begin to describe. I really, really want to eat some, it looks lovely. It's not lost on me that until I actually produce some clay, this is not functionally different to the daily activities of 3 year old me.  @jsbarretto it seems fun though! if you're still able to take pleasure in things you did when very young, that's something precious to be glad for Success! A less coarse sieve and some oven baking to remove excess moisture and I've a reasonable clay. Using some sand I have lying around (sadly not very fine) to act as grog, and I have a small pot.  @jsbarretto  @jsbarretto Just over a week later and, after drying in the attic suspended in an old pillowcase, I have myself about a kilogramme of fine clay. I'm quite impressed by how close this stuff feels and behaves to the 'professional' redware clay I bought to compare against. Maybe I'll try making something with it over the next few days. I'm sure it's bloomin obvious to anybody that's been doing pottery for a while, but the fact that clay is so easy to produce yourself (provided you have the soil for it) is quite enjoyable. @happyborg Ours also! Spaniels are such mucky buggers. We have to towel him down every time he comes inside |
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Also, most of the pot didn't get hot enough to properly fuse. I'll have to think about better ways of trapping heat than simply placing a saucepan lid over it.