"As Du Volant" (skuhnphoto)
05/27/2016 at 21:52 • Filed to: pottery
2
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"As Du Volant" (skuhnphoto)
05/27/2016 at 21:52 • Filed to: pottery | 2
| 9 |
Sometimes some interesting things come together.
There are several ways to make pottery. Two of the major ones are throwing (using the wheel) and hand building (using your hands- amazing!). I’ve done both of those but I’m more into the latter. I usually roll out slabs of clay, cut them into appropriate sizes, and build things out of them. Like this:
When using slabs, you can lay a textured surface onto the clay and roll it on with a rolling pin, resulting in cool-looking textured parts like the mug pictured above. That was done using a placemat, by the way, but I think the end result almost looks like snake skin. I glazed this one last week and it should be fired and ready to take home tomorrow.
Now on to my story...
I had this brilliant (or so I thought) idea that I’d like to make some pieces using a tire tread pattern. What’s the best way to make a tire tread pattern? Use a piece of a tire, of course! So...
Today before I left work I fished a tire out of the junk pile and took it home.
I thought to myself this should be an easy enough job. Grab the sawzall, slice out a chunk of tire, go drink some beer. 15 minutes tops.
Hoo boy, was I wrong.
As most of us know, tires are reinforced with steel belts. Steel is hard. But the steel belts are just lots of tiny pieces of wire... how hard could they be to cut?
Extremely hard, actually. The steel belts in a tire aren’t like strands of wire laid out through the rubber. Nope, they’re woven together. It’s almost like a flat cable. I didn’t realize this until I’d started trying to cut into the tire and the sawzall was just bouncing off.
My girlfriend’s heavy duty garden shears (with 24 inch handles) got me through the bead of the tire. The bead is reinforced with a band of steel belting as thick as your pinky finger, if you were wondering. The sidewall was a piece of cake, the sawzall went through it like a knife through butter. The tread was a different story altogether.
After 20 minutes of work I’d sawed through about a quarter inch of tread. This plan was not working. But dammit, I want a tire tread coffee mug, and I wanted to make this work. What to do?
“Aha!” I thought. “I’ll try the drill!” And it worked! I drilled dozens of holes across the tire, perforating it like a piece of notebook paper. Every now and then I’d hit a tough spot and the rubber would start to smoke so I’d have to back off a little. After drilling I brought out the sawzall again, and it managed to get through the remaining bits of steel holding the tire together, with a little help from my 12-inch-handle wire cutters here and there.
After an hour of sweating and cursing...
Success!
Something I hadn’t considered is that the cut pieces of steel belts were sharp as hell. Nothing a little bit of duct tape couldn’t fix, after washing the grime off the tire-chunk of course.
All told, this “quick” slicing job took me over an hour, and I was completely drenched in sweat. Beer time became shower beer time.
And that, ladies and gents, is how I’m going to wind up strolling into the pottery studio tomorrow morning with a severed chunk of car tire under my arm. Will it actually work for making tire-treaded pottery? We’ll find out in 12 hours...
OPPOsaurus WRX
> As Du Volant
05/27/2016 at 22:11 |
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My guess is that the tread pattern wont read well for a coffee mug because of the size difference.
i bet something liek this would be cool.
this thing came up in the GIS and is just cool
and I painted your mug for you
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As Du Volant
> OPPOsaurus WRX
05/27/2016 at 22:15 |
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Well, I make bigger stuff too! I wanted to make some planters as well, so that could be an option.
If only EssExTee could be so grossly incandescent
> As Du Volant
05/27/2016 at 22:16 |
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OPPOsaurus WRX
> As Du Volant
05/27/2016 at 22:19 |
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I made a bunch of CAD tred patterns if that would ever be of any use
Wacko
> As Du Volant
05/27/2016 at 22:34 |
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Did you try a grinder with a cut off wheel?
If I ever need to cut a car tire I would try that. Well, now I would since you tried the sawzall.
Eric @ opposite-lock.com
> As Du Volant
05/27/2016 at 22:43 |
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You should hit up your local R/C hobby shop or track (not sure where you are) and look at R/C car tires. They are smaller with smaller tread patterns and you could even cut them up with scissors pretty easily if you needed to.
Sam
> As Du Volant
05/27/2016 at 22:48 |
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Might work well, might not. But as you know, you can’t tell until you try it!
You can tell a Finn but you can't tell him much
> As Du Volant
05/28/2016 at 21:44 |
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Snow tires might work well even for something small. Though the siping might tear up the clay instead of printing nicely.
TysMagic
> As Du Volant
07/29/2016 at 09:34 |
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So I got here via a rabbit hole...and I don’t have the next step of this in the side bar. Did it work? My interest is piqued