Help! I can't center

hi YouTube um it's been a long time since I made a video but I think I finally got the camera stuff going I think I finally have the video editing software figured out and I've got some stuff that I think is important enough to make another video um so we like to talk about today is the centering and what can go wrong during centering how to diagnose it and how to fix it so we'll start right from the very beginning you put the clay and it's not in the middle don't try to push it in the middle from here pick it back up yeah you're going to do a ball again and put it in the middle now people have I think the first issue that I see with beginners if they have one is going to be its sliding off the wheel head so that can be caused by a few few things one is that they don't have it bad enough or not wet at all so when they apply pressure to it it just wants to move this can help are this can go in conjunction with having the bat dry the best dried the clay doesn't want to stick to it if the bands of the bet is just a little bit damp not super damp you don't want it shiny it should look damp though like dark you put it on there it's going to stick a lot better now we put it on and I see to hit it twice over time I know that hitting it twice has is the right amount people hit different partners but hitting it once usually isn't enough and hitting it five times usually flattens it out it shouldn't be flat it should be puffy and now it's stuck now the second thing that can cause people from getting to get water underneath it is by pushing in one direction if it doesn't get water underneath it pushing one direction can also cause elephant butter but which we'll talk about later right now it's it's stuck and we'll get it back and we'll try to get it to slide off so that we can fix it so I've got it nice and wet up mr. Tim said get it back so it's wet it's moving I'm going to push on it and it all it slides off and normally we go around the wheel oh oh it's a big mess now if you've got chunkies on it like I do now I should try to remove as many of the chunkies as possible which I pretty much probably record that ball of clay but we're going to fix it so I'm going to remove as many chunkies as possible screw that next ball of clay recreate that and won't let it slide off that time oh I push oh that slides off and it's all slimy underneath and the little beginners do they try to they try to sneak it like nobody's watching they put it back in the middle they hit again and ah it's not sticking so then they use their imagination and they go doing all sorts of things to clean it off what works best is to take take it off take your flexible model route of death scrape the edge remove the slip from the bottom of the ball this is this is the quick and easy one I mean you couldn't completely let the ball you know dry up and and all that you remesh it you're going to take a rubber rib don't use the flexible metal rubber death on your bat it'll it'll start starting to get rough which can cause you other issues later use something that's a little less aggressive then scrape the slip off don't get it wet again if you scrape it the slip off it should be sticky enough that you put it hit it twice that it sticks yeah now it's stuck next problem that we normally see is a ramp on the edge and that ramp forms from not pushing against the wheel head or starting against the wheel head and then moving your hands up when you move your hands up the clay is getting squeezed and go wherever it wants that doesn't want to go right in the middle it goes out mix a ramp underneath so we'll do that Oh horrible oh my fingers can't stay against the wheel that I can't stay down all my hand is going all over the place so to fix that would be one you press down you get it right to the wheel head and then you do your normal proper centering practices like pressing down against the wheel head coming up and coming down that will keep that away next next problem that you know we see is the mushroom so mushrooms happen when you cone up and then you press down without doing anything below so not only is it really hard to Center but it also makes a mushroom II kind of thing I'll say this is exaggerated and we just still do this in the undercutting oh we get this mushroom II kind of shape anytime you've got the clay when you're centering it's narrower than what's above it it becomes a lot of stress on the part that's narrow because you can put more torque here than what the bottom part there can handle it kind of torques it unevenly and that can cause rips and little air bubbles that you might not see when you're centering but can show up when you're pulling so to prevent that from happening when you cone down you need to make sure your right hand is pressing against simulit and then you're putting quite a bit of pressure on that clay if you're not pushing pressure if you're not putting pressure on that clay then it's not gonna go in the middle and it's not gonna spread out the way you want so I'm going to try to do this open handed so that so that my hand is on top now normally everything would be closed up so that they're working together but I'm going to do this so that you can see how the clay moves I'm pressing forward a little bit okay goes into my right hand the right hand pushes it into the shape that I want and then I let go slowly so we get to like a gumdrop shake and you repeat that until it's centered now motion is one problem next problem is volcanoes and volcanoes have a lot of and lavas hot and hot stuff burns we don't want volcanoes volcanoes happen usually from coning down too far so you get a junior min if you go past the gumdrop and go to junior mint when you squeeze to go up look can you see that that the clay on the outside is a lot it's easier for it to move up quicker than the stuff in the middle so if you have a round dome it pushes that stuff up in the middle along with the rest of the clay when you go further and make some volcano so now we've got a volcano well Kino's don't work to get rid of the volcano it's best to press down just on the edge and let it flatten out again and then compress it and get it back into a gumdrop shape so to prevent it from happening don't go down all the way to junior mint from south flat and white it is and you get rid of it just push down on the edge don't try to Center the whole thing you want to get rid of that so it doesn't track bubbles and and water in the rest of your clay and then the last thing that can really happen with with centering is called elephant button and this is like the fourth take I've tried of this video and I am unable to to repetitively recreate alpha but there's a perfect storm of problems that happen to hit an elephant but one of them is that you're using a bat that's fuzzy and a fuzzy bat allows air to get underneath it and when the air gets underneath it it lifts up on one side when you're pushing in one direction when that lifts up it kind of spins air into the center of the clay if you're Claver pops off the wheel and you flip it over and there's like a a divot in the middle that's kind of twisty that's what's an elephant we call an elephant but so it can come from pushing in one direction having a fuzzy bat that can't make a good seal not using enough water when you're centering all those things can contribute to the elephant but um sometimes you may throw and not know that you elephant but because your Clayton Popoff but when you cut it off and you go to trim it you'll see a spiral of air in the middle and that can also cause air bubbles into your pot so you might say I know I wedged it clay I just cut it off the Box blabbity blah let me find all these air bubbles that could actually be how you're centering and not so much the Clay's fault so there we go that's uh how to fix some common centering problems and how to avoid them

Channel: Timsee clay

Views: 1,216,097

Rating: 4.7940869 out of 5

Keywords: Tim, See, timseeclay, pottery, centering, throwing, wheel, fails, lessons, help, howto, guide, tutorial, Tips, Tricks, ceramics

Id: rMWQ7eIbp98

Length: 8min 37sec (517 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 28 2011