John Post

These are a few pics of my studio space. The flat screen TV on the wall is awesome during football season. My favorite wheel is a Bailey. I like the one piece splash pan design because you can get up close to the pots on the wheel and the wheel is ultra-quiet. These shots were taken when I was doing some spring cleaning. My goal was to get all the tools to have homes off of the tables. I have 3 nine foot tables in the studio, but was using them almost like shelves. That's been remedied now that I added more shelves and hooks on the walls.

This is a photo of my wheel. I built a small wood shelf with two levels so I can make an even larger mess of my tools while I am working.

There is an exhaust fan in the wall where I weigh and mix glazes. It really sucks the air and dusts out of the studio. The bins below the tables are Rubbermaid 8 gallon containers. They will hold a 50 pound bag of any glaze material. I like that they are translucent and with a glance I can tell if I need to re-order anything.

Check out the big orange calculator next to the breaker panel. Only $4 at a local store.

The heating unit is the best tool I ever got for my studio. Now I can work in there in the middle of a Michigan winter. I have a digital thermostat that I keep at 41 degrees F (that's as low as it goes), and then I just turn it up when I want to go to work. The studio heats up in minutes. At 41° F, glazes and clays don't freeze over the winter.

This cubby was a teacher mailbox at a school that was being renovated. Lots of odds and ends fit in it. My i-pod fits nicely into a little cube speaker. It's great not having to touch a cd player with clay covered hands.

As part of giving all the tools their own home, I mounted my two rolling pins on the wall with J and L shaped hooks.

These black plastic tool bins are available at Lowes. You mount a small yellow plastic track on the wall and the black bins hang on that. The cool part is that you can take the bins off the wall to where you need them, and they are deep enough to hold a good amount. You can judge the scale of them by looking at the one that has the 3 cone boxes.

Without a sink I use a Rubbermaid trash can in the corner filled with water for studio scrap. I sprinkle epsom salts in it every now and then so that all the solids settle out. An old 10 foot piece of garden hose is used to siphon water to the outside when it is too full to dump more in. The corner shelves let me put freshly washed stuff over the bucket to drip dry.

These are the tools I use for kiln shelf cleaning. The silver chisel is a dental tool that a student's mom who is a dental hygienist gave me. I don't want to know what a dentist is doing in your mouth if he needs a chisel that big.

I wanted to get my Walker Pugmill up against a wall because I have a really tiny studio. The arm that pushes down the clay in the hopper was the problem. It kept clunking around on the wall. In the second picture you can see a big hook I use to keep it upright when I don't need it and a piece of scrap lumber used as a bumper on the wall.

If you happen to need the manual for a Walker Pugmill you can download it in pdf form here. I happen to have a copy of the manual and scanned it for a potter and have had a few more requests since then.

This is my little Aim 88 test kiln. I got the computer controller for it on e-bay. The kiln plugs into the contoller and the controller plugs into the wall. With the controller I can slow cool glazes just like I would in my larger kiln. I can fit 4 little bud vase in here or around 40 test tiles.

This is a very high tech peep hole plug retainer. Two drywall screws and a piece of wire. I enlarge the peepholes on my kilns so I can see the cones easier. Because of this I worry that the home made plug might fall out. This high tech device prevents that from happening.

This shot shows the restraining wire in the open position.

I had a a lot of old broken kiln shelves. I trimmed them up and made a variety of rectangular shelves for the kiln. The rounded ends go great under pots where the runniness is iffy. Home Depot has a wet tile saw in their rental section that slices through a kiln shelf in just a few seconds.

This is my newest kiln as of June 2009. It's a little 1.4 cubic foot Paragon. I love it. It's just big enough to hold 4 soup bowls with a handful of smaller bowls, mugs or test tiles around it. It's hard for me to make enough time during the school year to make enough work to go through a bunch of firings in my larger Evenheat kilns. I like to make a few things and try glaze ideas out as fast as I can sometimes. This little kiln is great for that. I am so spoiled with the aesthetic look from slow cooling kilns that the first thing I purchased after the kiln was the wall mount controller. I got it from Vulcan Kilns for about $350. I found them on e-bay. I originally purchased the little kiln on e-bay for $150. So the total cost of the kiln and the controller came out to a little over $500. Not too bad, and it lets me be in total control of the firings, heating and cooling rates.

I take the kiln sitters off of the electric kilns I convert to use with electronic controllers. Some folks like to use them as back up devices in case of a stuck relay and an overfire by the controller. I had a kiln sitter trip and shut down few firings earlier than I had programmed into the controller, so I just take them out of the circuit to avoid future mishaps. Having said that, I use the delay function on my kiln to start it at a time that allows me to be around when the kiln is reaching its peak temperature. Then I can watch to make sure the controller is functioning properly. On the right of the kiln, you can see where I drilled through the body to insert the thermocouple. I love the power knob on this old kiln. It feels like it came right out of the 1960's. The inside of this kiln was in mint new shape when I got it, even though it is probably pretty old.

This is the kiln I have had the longest. It's an Evenheat 2322. It's 5.8 cubic feet and has a built in electronic controller.

It's easy to forget how hard glaze materials are until you look at how those rocks can abrade stainless steel. My old Jiffy Mixer is on the left and the new one is on the right. You can see just how thin and sharp the metal ring is on the old one... that and the blades are completely worn off. I'm on my third one.