8 How To Grind Your Pottery - Using A (Cheap) Grinding Disc

Welcome. I hope you're doing well. Today, I'm going to show you how you can grind your pottery so you get a nice, smooth surface so it doesn't scratch your table or wherever you put your pottery. And I'm going to show you a more efficient way of doing that than what most potters are doing. And not only that, I'm going to show you where you can buy these tools as a fraction of what you would normally pay at a pottery supply store. The video today is not going to be so long because what I'm going to show you is actually very simple. So let's first look at some pots. I just got some some pots out of the of the glaze firing. And as most times they get these little cracks down here, it's actually not so bad for this one, but there's some some small crackles here or not crackles, but some some uneven surface that will essentially, if I put this in my window, it will scratch the surface. The same thing goes for this one, although it's not too bad. But as you can see, there's a little bit of unevenness here and potentially it could scratch the surface where I put it. So I want to grind this to make it smooth and nice. And what most potters do is they use this and I'm just looking around for it. I have it here, a diamond sponge. You've probably seen this. You can get them in different grids. This is a 200 grit. It's really fine. You can get them finer than this and more red than this or more coarse than this. And you can take your pot and you can you can grind it manually like this. I'm not going to do it now because you need a little bit of water on this and you also need some protection gear. I'm going to show you a much more efficient way of grinding your pottery. And that is a grinding disc. I have one like this here. A grinding disc is essentially the same material as you would use on the sponge. It's either a diamond material, as in this case, you can also get them in some cheaper materials that are not that efficient enough, but they're not going to last as long. These surfaces are going to last more or less a lifetime. So basically you essentially use them the same way, except for this one, I bought a 12 inch disc and I glued it on with some instant glues and fast gluing stuff you can buy anywhere. And I put it on a normal bed. So I had this wooden bed that I didn't use so much anyway, and I put it on this one. So now I can put it on my wheel head whenever I need to grind something and it's much more efficient. So let's go ahead and see what that looks like. So to place this on the wheel head can be a little bit tricky because the holes, of course, on the back and you have the back pins here. And so, you know, it can be a little bit tricky. But I found that if you if you put your finger to the hole and you place it above the bed pin, you can fairly easy find the first one. And once you have the first one, it's easy enough to to tweak it around so it fits. Now, that's the first part. You also need some water, not so much because of the grinding effect, but because if there's water on the surface, you're going to have less dust and dust, especially as fine particles that come from your grinding ceramics and glaze is really bad for your lungs. So unless you're only going to do this once in your lifetime, I very much recommend that you put some protection gear on. Water, of course, is going to keep this dust a little down. So basically just put water on it. I mean, I see some potters that also have some some sort of running water. I don't know. It's probably better. But this turned out to work just fine for me. So now we got it wet and now you need to put on your protection gear. I always use a mask, just something that can filter out small particles should be good. And I use some glasses. You could probably get better ones than this, but this will protect your eyes from any dust that goes the wrong way. So basically now I'm probably going to sound a little bit strange when I put this mask on. Stranger than normal, but I hope you can still hear me. So now we're ready and you can have the wheels spinning. And so let's try out with this one first. As you saw, there's a little bit of unevenness. It's not too bad, but just put it here. So that's it. Now it's like smooth like baby skin. It's so perfect. Let's take another one. This one has a flat bottom, so there's no room. But there's a little more, a little more, I don't know what it is, some some some sort of clay that got stuck there. It happens all the time. So let's try with this one, because this is actually a little more than the other one. Remember to hold on to it because you don't want it flying off the bed. It's a little more. Let's give it a little more water just to make sure. So now you can still see that there was some scratches, but now again, it feels perfectly smooth. So I mean, that is much, much easier than using the hand grinder. You can, of course, still use that for small things, but I like using this. It's just so much easier. So next step is, where do you buy these grinding discs? As I said in the beginning, you can buy these grinding discs in several different kind of stores, as you've probably seen in some of my other videos. I really like buying my tools from non-pottery stores. It's not because I don't want to support these stores. I do and I do buy specialized tools, but industrial tools like grinding discs essentially is. I like to buy from hardware stores or just other kind of stores that sell these kind of things much, much cheaper than what pottery stores do. It can be a little bit tricky to find these large. This is a 12 inch grinding disc, but I found them on eBay from a Chinese store. And if you buy these grinding discs from a pottery supply store, I mean, diamond tools are making some. I heard they're great, no doubt about that, but they are anywhere between one and two hundred dollars for one disc, depending on the grid. I found one, this one I bought from eBay, from a store, I think in Hong Kong. And it was only about, I think it was 20, 22 UK pound, including shipping. So that's like a fraction of what they cost. And it's essentially it's the same industrial product. I think it worked great for me anyway. I will put the link to where I bought mine down here in the description. So please go ahead and follow that if you like. The other one, the small grinding one here, I also use that because if I just have small things I need to do, I don't want to go ahead with the big one. I use this. This one you can also buy in the pottery store, pottery supply stores. I admit, I bought this on Wish. It's actually functioned great. And I think it was, I don't know, five dollars, something much, much cheaper than what you would usually buy. So this is how I grind my pottery. I hope you was inspired by this. Remember to subscribe to my channel. There's going to be a lot more interesting videos coming up with different techniques and tools and tricks. So subscribe and you will be notified. Have a good day.