Pyewackette

Butter Butler? Maybe with some creative sculpting or glaze work? Now don't go and trademark that!

Too cold (for me) today to work outside, plus I forgot to grab a bat while I was at the studio yesterday. The high today will be 70 (still chilly to my mind) and it won't hit that until 6PM. But they are projecting a high of 93 for tomorrow. Hopefully I'll remember to grab a bat tonight. (Of course I WILL ask first). I think there is a cat living in my brush pile ...

A treadle wheel would certainly be useful if you're working somewhere where there isn't any power. Say a shed, or your patio or porch (if there are no outdoor outlets there). Or your survivalist compound. Like that.

Here is the view from my Summer Studio (on the back porch). Yes that's a pile of brush. I cut down a Holly tree that was crowding the eaves awhile back because (a) it had been hacked into pompom shapes at some point and (b) it was too big for where it was at even if it HADN'T been turned into a monstrosity of psudeo-topiary. I'm working on it. I am building a beetle bank as I cut it up into smaller pieces. I'm only recently beginning to be normal, health-wise, again. And those are my curry leaf plants - what's left of them after 6 months of torture - in that cage to protect them from the blue jay that has developed a taste, apparently, for Indian herbs. @Hulk my orchids got left behind in the move. I'd had them for 3 years. Poo! (I had been painting, that seemed like the never-ending-renovation) They bloomed every single year. I can't believe that's the only picture I ever took of them. I miss my orchids! Still haven't found my bats. I was hoping there was at least one in the box with the wheel, but NOOoooOOooOoo! I'll have to borry one from the studio until I find mine or get some, or I break down and make the hardiebacker bats I've been threatening to make. They're cut. I just need to measure for the bat pins, find some tubing as hole protectors, and Do It. And here is what I have to look forward to when it gets cold again: Minus the washing machine and accoutrements which are going next to the kitchen sink. It's a little Magic Chef portable washer, the middle sized one. The whole room is all of 6'x6.25'. No windows. Barely any space at all. There is a utility tub on the wall to the left in the garage so there is that. So yay! Guess which space I prefer!

My little purple cup with the blobs at the bottom from runny glaze - the liner glaze crazed but I didn't notice until enough tea had gotten in there to stain the cracks. However my tea is just tea - no milk, no sugar - so seems unlikely to grow bad stuff. I wouldn't sell it (well no one would BUY it, but you know what I mean) but I continue to use it - for now. Eventually I'll have so many not-that-great cups and mugs that it'll get tossed and replaced with something slightly better that hopefully won't craze, like whatever glaze they settle on so we finally have a cone 10 liner glaze that won't craze LOL! That looks sort of like pinholing, which for some bizarre reason seems worse to me than crazing. I would toss that anyway. Not logical - crazing gives you the same sort of exposure to bugs and fungi and mold as pinholes - but I hate pinholes more.

@oldlady No wars here, and if there were, it wouldn't be you who started 'em, LOL! I tried to be complete for anybody who needs the information but if you don't need to crop, just skip that step. For most pictures taken with a cell phone camera reducing to 25% of the original size will be just fine. The last two pictures I posted were reduced to 50% for the first of those 2, and 25% (75% total reduction) for the second. I can't tell a difference between them. Of course it depends on how large they were to start with. BTW - my avatar? Made in Gimp over a decade ago from an original drawing of mine that I scanned and processed. Clearly my drawing skills are not all that, but I still like it.

@Pres Gimp is a professional level program. But its a bit much for the non-computer person. The most recent versions have gotten a bit complex even for people who have used it for years. I absolutely encourage its use for anybody with enough tech savvy to do so. Just not a solution here. It'd be like nuking a fly, LOL!

BTW I totally forgot, one of the functions I was asked about was how to rotate pictures that end up sideways. It's easy to do it in Photo and I won't go into that for anyone who already knows how to do that, but it can be done in Paint pretty easily as well and here is how (IN PICTURES): Make sure the HOME tab is active (click on it if you're not sure) Then find Rotate under the list that goes Crop - Resize - Rotate and click on Rotate to bring up the rotation popup menu. If you have a sideways picture you're going to want to rotate it by 90 degrees. If you pick the wrong direction at first it is no big deal, just click the same rotation until its oriented the way you want it. And for anybody - anybody at all - having trouble with something computer related like this - if you don't want to risk some youngling's dismissive everybody-knows-how-to-do-that attitude, PM me. I'll help you straighten things out. EVERYTHING is easy once you know how to do it. I won't have access to the newest version of Word but I have older versions on several of my older PCs. I've never been an Excel user so I can't be much help with that. And I can't promise to help with sophisticated programs - I'm at least 20 years behind on Photoshop and at least 8 years behind on GIMP (though since GIMP is free and I'm about to have a new PC I MIGHT be able to come back up to speed on that) but with anything less specific I will help however I can, without the risk of sneerage LOL! And just let me make time here for a little bit of definition. A FILE is a document or photo of any sort, including programs. It is any one thing on your hard drive. A FOLDER - think of manila folders like you put in a filing cabinet. It is a specific place where files are stored. It is itself a specific type of file, one that tells you where to find OTHER files. In the real world you might have many documents, say lecture notes. You would keep those in a manila folder that is labeled with a name that makes it easy for you to find again. Then that manila folder would go into one of those green hanging folders with other folders that might have related information in them. Think of the files and folders on your computer as the components of a literal, real world filing system, where the PC is your file cabinet. Think of the individual hard drives as the individual drawers of a file cabinet. These will have names like C: D: F: So C:\Users would then be the User folder in the C: drawer. It will have a file icon next to it in Windows Explorer. If you click on it to open it you will see more folders and maybe a few files (which will NOT have a folder icon next to them and MAY have a suffix attached such as .jpg for a picture file, .docx for a Word file, etc.) The thing is that Windows as shipped nearly always has the suffix obscured which I find less than helpful but you can tell the difference between another folder and a terminal file (eg a document, photo, or program file) by the presence or absence of the folder icon. Each folder is just the electronic representation of a folder in a real-world file cabinet. Each terminal file is the electronic representation of a single entity such as a document, a letter, a photo, a movie, or a song. I hope that hasn't made things clear as mud.

IF you're happy using Paint 3d, have at it. Personally I HATE it and I was specifically asked by another forum member for info on how to do this. If you don't need the info, why grouse about those who do? The story in pictures was in response to someone asking for exact directions. My directions in English were not clear enough for someone who is not comfortable with computers and software.

OK, part 2 of the Paint tutorial - how to use Paint to open a file. Click on the FILE tab Which brings up the file popup menu. If the picture you are after happens to be in the list of recent photos, click on the title. You're home free. If not, click on the OPEN button to bring up the file browser. Use the file browser (aka Windows Explorer) to browse to wherever your pictures are. All of mine that I care about are currently on the Desktop because this ISN'T my computer so I keep them where they can easily be deleted whenever I finally get my new PC hooked up and my poor son gets his laptop back. So just select whichever photo you want to smallify by double clicking on it as usual. If you click on the drop down next to the picture icon (circled in red) you can select thumbnails/icons to make it easier to find your pictures. I picked Gecko My Gecko for our example picture because I'm that much of a narcissist. Here it is in its full ginormous beauty: So this thing is enormous at 4120 x 3096 pixels and 3.3MB (Paint shows photo dimensions and file size at the bottom, circled in red - note that it DOES NOT UPDATE these values until you have saved to a named file). This is more than 3x the max allowed to upload for an entire post. ALL your files in a post have to be less than a total of 1MB in size. So lets SMALLIFY! First lets get it to where we can actually see it to work on it. Go to the VIEW tab (cirled in red) and click on ZOOM IN however many times it takes to get it fully on your screen, but still big enough to see what you're doing. Note the caret I circled at the top far right - if you are on a stinky little laptop screen like I am, and you just don't have enough space to see the whole image because the stupid Paint zoom function doesn't have the granularity to let you get it just where you want it (it only zooms in and out preset amounts), you can click on that caret and it will collapse the menu to give you more space for the image. The tabs (File, Home, View) will still show and you can bring the icons back by clicking on the caret (which will now point down) again. Gets you a little more room to work with when you need that. So now you can see the whole picture but its still ginormous. Now lets start smallifying! NOTE: If at any point you accidentally move or cut something, HIT CTL-Z. It will save you. It will undo whatever you just did. In this case there is a lot of extraneous stuff that nobody needs to see. Well actually probably nobody needs to see Mr. Gecko either, but for sure all the studio mess is altogether unnecessary and uninteresting. So lets start by cropping. Click on the HOME tab so we can get back to work. First we are going to SELECT the area we want to keep - everything OUTSIDE the area you select will get deleted. So first click SELECT - that will give you a crosshair that you will use to draw a rectangle around the area of interest. I start at the upper Left corner, you can start wherever you want but that's just what I do. You position the crosshair where you want to start and then push the left mouse button and HOLD while dragging the mouse to draw that dotted white line around the area you want to keep. Let go when you have it how you want it. You can't change it once its drawn but you can throw it away and start over - just click once anywhere outside the selected area and start over. When you've got it how you want it, hit CROP (purple circle, the last thing you will do in this step). So now its been cropped, and saved so we can see how far we've come. OK we've cut it down from 3.3MB to 777KB (about .78MB) which is TECHNICALLY smaller and will fit under the 1MB limit as long as its the only picture you're posting - but there IS a lifetime limit for all attachments (uploaded photos to the forum) so I would suggest you may not want to leave it at that. I don't remember the exact lifetime limit but given the high probability that the forum will probably change before most of us hit that anyway, I won't go into how but you CAN if you want go back and delete photos to free some of that space up. But it is way easier not to risk hitting it to start with, so let's smallify it some more. We will do that by actually resizing it next. Staying on the Home tab; Click Resize to bring up the Resize popup menu. Make sure Maintain Aspect Ratio IS selected (has a check mark in the square). You can do this either by percentages - which I use, its just easier. I use 50% unless text is involved - text can get hard to read at that level, I usually go for 70% if there is text. YMMV. NOTE THAT if you want to do it by absolute pixel size, all you have to do is click on the empty circle next to the PIXEL label and it will display in pixels, see this post for a picture of that. Click OK when you've got the values the way you want them. Ignore the sizes circled at the bottom, I changed these pics a lot while writing this tutorial up and they're not meaningful any more. I resized the picture to 50% and saved, then resized again another 50% and saved again. Here are the pictures and I doubt you'll see a significant difference between them except for the file sizes: First resize to 50% = 1381 x 793 pixels, 267 Kb Second resize by another 50% (75% total) = 691 x 397 pixels, 92.3Kb To save you would select the FILE tab and I always do SAVE AS and pick Jpeg as the type, otherwise it defaults to png. If you just pick SAVE it will try to save it over the original file, but it will ask you first. If you want to save to a new file name still pick SAVE AS and if you don't pick a file type it will automatically save it as png with whatever file name you choose to give it. Does that help? Pye

@oldlady No problem! We can tell the story in pictures. I'll start from the beginning for those who don't have Paint already on their toolbars. I'll have to do this in two posts because the limit is not just 1MB per picture, it is 1MB per POST. Note that I use a dark theme so the background on your own computers will look a little different (unless you, too, have turned to the Dark Side MWAH HA HA HA HA!) So first lets find Paint on your computer. Go to your toolbar and click the magnifying glass icon: Type Paint in to the search field (see red circled areas below). Then Right Click on the program Paint represented by the palette icon. That brings up a popup menu where you can pin it to your start menu or to the taskbar, I arbitrarily chose the task bar. That will put it into the bar at the bottom of your screen. See the first post for how to get a shortcut on your desktop. It will put it last on the toolbar, you can move it if you want by left clicking it and dragging it (hold down left click and move the mouse) OK Now you have access to Paint! Now just click on that as usual to run it. It will open the program with the Home tab activated. That little white box is your canvas - I size that to be really small (using the Resize option, see next post) so that when I copy something in (using CTL-A to select all then CTL-V to paste in whatever image I copied before) it will resize to the size of the image so I don't get white space. If you DO get white space for some reason, just immediately click CROP after you do your paste and it will crop to the size of the image you just pasted in. OK now we all have access to the Paint program. How to use it coming up in the next post. I don't know why but it keeps putting an extra picture here at the bottom that doesn't belong. I've deleted it THREE TIMES. Just ignore anything after this text.

@oldlady You can still use pixels if you want to. When you click on resize just select the radio button that says Pixels and it will switch to that. Sorry if you actually already know how to do that and just have been choosing not to. This is one of the few things I can actually help with around here, I was a software engineer once upon a time. LOL! Pye

I've been asked to write a short tutorial for how to do this under Win10. No really! Seriously I totally understand why this has become an issue under Win10 for people who managed it just fine previously under Win7 (I actually have computers that still run Win7, and even a micro laptop that still runs Vista). I immediately had issues with Paint 3d, the dumbest damn piece of crap software I've ever been forced to deal with. Well one of, anyway. Turns out - Paint is STILL on Win10, they just hid it. So - I'm assuming folks used to use Paint to resize their pics, I know I always have (do). On that assumption here is how to find Paint on your Win10 system. Yup. It's still there. The MicroSoft folks just hid it from us, maybe they were embarrassed! Click on the magnifying glass icon in the toolbar at the bottom - it is the second icon from the left (right next to the Windows Start icon). Type in Paint. Paint will appear in the list of found items. You can pin it to the start menu, or to the taskbar by right clicking and selecting one of those options. You can create a shortcut on the desktop by left clicking on the desktop, select New, select Shortcut, enter %windir%\system32\mspaint.exe , click next, name it Paint or whatever you want to, then it will place that shortcut on the desktop. Now just copy-paste the image you want into Paint (or open the file if you have a local copy), select all, and use the resize option just like we have been doing for 90 bazillion years. Save. Eh voila, your photo be SMALLER. Anybody need more info than that, I will happily provide. Pye Fellow hater of Paint3d

Awlrighty then!

I can understand that compared to the Shimpo (as it turns out) - but would you prefer the Bailey to a comparable Peter Pugger too?

@Mark C. @neilestrick I totally agree, the 7SS is extremely small. The output increase from that to the 9SS is more than worthwhile. Even so, my main concern with the smaller machine is not so much the time - I've got plenty, especially for a relatively low-energy output endeavour during which I could spend the "downtime" burnishing something, the interruptions to re-feed the machine would just help keep my hands from cramping up - as it is the wear and tear on such a small machine if you actually DID keep it in constant operation. That machine is really for the hobby hobbyist. I've seen a video where the guy is using one of those and its doll-size. To me its the equivalent of those little doll kilns people get to do glass beads or miniatures or whatever you can do with those eensy things. And he was trying to process like 2000 lbs of backlogged reclaim through it. I hope he got it super cheap (it was a used unit). Part of the reason I was leaning towards the 9SS was I assumed it weighed significantly less than the 20SS but turns out THAT was wrong big time. 9SS 256 lbs 36" long x 14" wide x 14" high 20SS 280 lbs 42" long x 14" wide x 20" high Only 24 lbs difference! The 20SS isn't THAT much bigger dimensionally either, which I guess goes a long way towards explaining the relatively small difference in output. Again, I don't see you getting a huge performance difference between the 9SS and the 20SS, hopper chamber size aside. The size of the hopper door is not insignificant - 5.5" square vs 7" square, which sounds like 1.5" big deal but do the math. That's 30.25 sq inches vs 49 sq inches, actually the hopper door alone on the 20SS is almost 2/3 larger. I mean that's not insignificant. But I'm not sure its all that pertinent to me personally. I just don't see how I would ever work to capacity in the 20SS. If I DO start mixing my own clay bodies - and that is an option I want to keep open - I wouldn't HAVE to mix up 500 pounds at a time. Given I have to drive 5 and a half hours to the nearest place to get clay, Yeah, I was figuring on coming back with like half a ton at a time. Actually whatever I could max the car I would be driving at, so I wouldn't have to make the trip so often. Coming back with the same amount in dry clay ingredients would make the trip more efficient. With bagged clay, it would sit around while I worked my way through it, hardening up and having to be repugged even if I DIDN'T need to pug it when fresh straight out of the bag. With powder, I would be fine mixing up 50 or 100lbs and pugging it out and then not doing it again until I've worked my way through most of it. I think when you look at it from the perspective of a professional, yeah, the 20SS is the smallest someone with any real throughput would want. I do have aspirations of becoming a very good potter, but given my age and condition I am liable to always be a low to moderate output potter. And I may not LIVE long enough to achieve my goal of becoming very good technically. I also suspect I'll use the pugger more often in the beginning when I am squashing most everything and will have a ton of reclaim. So ... for now at least, still leaning toward the 9SS. Honestly I'm just trying to avoid creeping elegance. You should see what I can do with kiln lust . Neil knows. I could spend myself into the poorhouse buying ever more shiny stufz. And I DO want to save some money just in case I really DO show evidence of needing that Great Big Kiln (but for now I'm sticking with one of the 2.5 cft L&Ls until I prove to myself one way or another just how large a kiln I deserve LOL!). And I'm going to want the Bailey version of advancer shelves in any kiln or kilns I end up with. Need to hold back some moola there as well. And you know in order to take advantage of that Great Big Kiln I would also need a heftier wheel (I have a Shimpo VL Lite, yeah, I should have gone with the Shimpo Whisper at a minimum but I was REALLY poor back then). I've been hauling that thing around for over 10 years now and its only been on once. Still in its original shipping box. I bet the belt is rotted out. I hope it will still turn on. Turned out I was not up to schlepping 5 gallon buckets of water and slop around. I kept hoping I could get somewhere to set it up but it didn't happen. I'll finally be able to use it here, if its still usable. I've got a space for it and a utility sink and everything. Now if I just have a usable wheel ...

I talked to the folks at Peter Pugger yesterday and what they say is, once you have mixed one batch, you can let it pug into the nose and then mix another batch. You can just chain it until you're done mixing (I'm talking about mixing from dry). I swear, multiple people (I thought) insisted the Bailey is easier to clean, but now that I've looked at them both in detail, that just can't be true. Especially with Min's report of a 2 hour cleanout process. What I found really helpful is that Peter Pugger has a cleaning breakdown for each model so you can SEE just exactly what comes apart when you have to clean. You have to go to the individual model and there is actually a tab in the info section just for cleaning. I was told that the mixing (from powder) capacity for each machine is roughly half the hopper size due to the way the volume changes once you wet it down - you can put roughly half the amount by weight of the dry in and that fills the chamber. Once you add water it mixes down in volume. So for mixing from powder 7SS - 14 lb hopper capacity = 350 lb/hour, 7 lb mixing = 100 lb/hour 9SS - 25 lb hopper capacity = 500 lb/hour, 13 lbs mixing = 150 lb/hour 20SS - 45 lb hopper capacity = 600 lb/hour, 23 lbs mixing = 180 lb/hour Honestly even the 7SS seems like plenty for me. If it takes me an hour to mix up 100 lbs, that doesn't seem like that much to me. I just can't see ever meeting the potential capacity from the 20SS. I can see a pretty big jump in output between the 7SS and the 9SS but the jump to the 20SS seems very small given the hopper capacity is nearly doubled. 7SS - 1/2 HP motors for both pugging and vacuum 9SS - 3/4 HP motor pugging, 1/2 HP vacuum 20SS - 1 HP motor pugging, 1/2 HP vacuum Apparently 240V is an option on any of these and I'd probably go for that - I have a 20A 240V circuit (well actually it is marked 220V in the electrical box, and my HVAC is marked 230V on the units) in the garage that I can't imagine ever having another use for, and these draw 4A, 6A, and 8A respectively (pugging motors) on 220V. I'm a bit short on 120V circuits out there, rather save that capacity for other things. I'm not saying the 7SS is my best bet, but I don't see that the 20SS is a clear winner here, either. Given the smaller motor and overall power available, I can see where the 7SS could be outgrown even by me (old decrepit neophyte that I am); but I don't see a clear advantage to going all the way to the 20SS either. Right now I'm inclined to stick with the 9SS. The only advantage for me that I see with the 20SS is that the nose cone and the hopper are 2 separate pieces which should make clean out easier - with the 9SS, that is one piece and even though it weighs about the same as the 20SS nose cone alone, with clay in them, the 9SS would weigh less - BUT I would have to horse it off there without banging it into the augur. On the 20SS, the nose cone comes off separately and then you take the (empty) hopper section off for cleaning. Of course I could always just rig a sling to help with removal. I wish I could try one and see! Anybody out there have the time to share your experience owning/using the smaller Peter Puggers? Pye

Will the pugger push it all out after mixing, or mostly, enough at any rate to mix another batch? or how would you mix multiple batches when it won't all fit in the hopper at once?

So sadly I AM finding out some less than stellar information about the Shimpo pugmills. This guy hates his 07ss This guy hates his 04ss The second one sounds like learning curve issues, but the first is worrisome. I don't find a whole lot about Shimpo pugmills out there (google is becoming more and more useless as they get hard core about sending you to commercial sites instead of informational links) - a handful of folks who have had one for years and seemed happy about it (generally these are blog posts that tend to be fairly old, like 6 or 7 years) and one offhand comment on Reddit (for what that's worth) about them being "crappy" with no further explanation. The way they treated that guy with the corrosion in his stainless steel barrel makes me not only not want a Shimpo pugmill, it makes me not want to upgrade my Shimpo wheel to another Shimpo. But, Russ has had the 04-not-ss for years (I found a post from 2013 so he's had it at least that long) and has been happy. I am further investigating. I sure do like the clamshell design on the 04ss (Sadly lacking on the 07). Peter Puggers claim to be true mixing pugmills, eg "mix clay from powder and water". I'm assuming you have to dig it out and mix multiple batches before you can pug it all. Has anybody actually mixed clay from dry to throwable in a Peter Pugger?

@GEP I don't think cleaning a Shimpo/Nidec is anything like as difficult as any other pugmill. Now that I've seen a video of someone cleaning out a Bailey (and only partially at that) I agree, that's an ordeal. No wonder my Engineer clay friend doesn't like it! I could swear I'd been told the Peter Pugger was worse to clean out and the Bailey was "easier" (than the PP) but it sure looks the other way 'round. But the Shimpos have a clamshell cover over the augur and the nose cone comes off entirely. @Russ says its a 5 minute cleanout, and it may be for him. (Hey, Russ, btw, how long have you had yours?) I'm pretty sure it would take me longer than that, but at least considerably less than the 2 hours @Min mentions for her Bailey. 2 hours for me to clean one of those would probably be extremely optimistic LOL! I'm coming to this late in life, after decades trying to get here. So no, I don't want to limit myself to one clay. Were I younger and still up to wedging I might feel differently, but that's not where I am. I love the red clays, I want to try some of the really delicate porcelain stuff, I want to burnish and that's earthenware. I like the exposed clay bodies, which is why I don't much care for the "white" stoneware at the studio where I've been working. Fired to bisque, its a sort of insipid pink with red spots - apparently it has a fair amount of iron for a "white" clay. Glazes tend to pinhole over it. Due to the changing of the guard over there, there are problems with it anyway right now but they're dead out of the B-mix clone they usually have that I might have tried instead. Anyway. I've never cared for the white clays much. Hsin Chuen Lin has inspired me to learn the porcelain, but I don't want to give up my lurvely lurvely reds. Besides, I've been told I'm the cleanest potter anyone has ever met. I would probably clean a pugmill between batches anyway. So whatever time I've got left, I want to spend it doing what I want to do and if that means getting an expensive piece of equipment like a pugmill and cleaning it out once in awhile, that's what I'll do. I know 100% that cleaning it out once in awhile is going to beat the drudgery and physical stress of trying to wedge hundreds of pounds of clay. At least I have the wherewithal to manage it financially (though nothing extra LOL!). I've had a windfall and I intend to spend it. What the heck would I be saving it for at my age? LOL! I just hope that I don't find out something bad about the Shimpo's now that I've got all excited about them. Like you can't get parts or they break down all the time. Or the free shipping ends before I have space for one. EEEK! Thanks for your comments. Pye

Actually, there is another reason I need to reclaim my clay. Once I've got my wheel setup, I will be squashing nearly everything I throw in my quest for the Perfect Cylinder. At every step I'll be throwing and squashing so I get a ton of practice. That's going to be a whole lotta clay to just throw out. Right now since I have to schlep myself and all my stuff all the way across town to the studio, I tend NOT to squash nearly as much as I ought. Having gone to all the trouble of getting out there its tough to come back with nothing concrete (or bisque, at any rate) to show for it. Plus its a class situation and I am at least somewhat susceptible to the blandishments of the instructor who of course wants his students to have something to keep at the end of class.