Frank Colson on sat 11 jun 05
Today's potter's world provides a wide and selective choice of wheels for
throwing pots. I notice that schools, organizations, art centers, guilds,
and about all and any type of environment where pots are being thrown,
predominantly use electric power wheels of one brand or
another. Personally, I am a believer in using a power wheel. In fact I was
the first franchise dealer for Shimpo Wheels in the Southeast when
it was initially introduced in the U.S.
Kickwheels, however, have always been a tool for the potter. And, in many
ways, still is. My first introduction to the kickwheel, was as
a student at Scripps College, in Claremont, California, when one of my
assignments was to build a kickwheel for a visiting potter in residence at
the college. That was Marguerite Wildenhain. Marguerite was one of only
three single women at the time, who essentially initiated
the emergence of the studio potter in American as we know it today! When
Marguerite would be giving a demo on "her" kickwheel, and
a crowd of students would squeeze in a little too tight for her comfort, she
would unknowingly, to us, add a profuse amount of water to
the pot she was throwing and spray us with a splatter of mud-water.
Astonished, we would all back off quickly.
You see, Marguerite purposely had no "splash pan" around her wheelhead. The
lesson, we soon learned, was that, if you wanted to learn
how to throw pots with really thin walls, or extreme cantilevers, you did
so with barely enough water on your hands to lubricate the clay while in
motion, not saturate it with water. That water saturation, clearly soften
the clay and by the time you were pulling up an 18" or 20" cylinder, the
bottom would start to collapse. Of course her stunt to clear the crowd away
was just a side effect she had at her disposal. Ever since that
early throwing lesson experience, I never used a splash pan, simply because
I could throw without ever getting "mud-water" on myself.
Even when I built a copy of Peter Voulkos' power wheel prototype, there was
no splash pan. Boy, was that a monster!
This was before any kind of commercial power wheel showed up. That baby had
a 1 1/2 horse motor on it that would grown louder than
anything, but no amount of clay would stop it from turning. I would put a
100 lb wedged lump of clay on that wheelhead, center it, and pull up three
feet or more with an even wall, at one standing. A good part of this was
the power wheel, but mostly because I didn't have a "splash pan" in my way.
I had learned my lesson well, and when I open my own exclusive wheel
throwing school, not one of more than a dozen kickwheels had a splash
pan. This is only one of a whole bunch of reasons I favored a kickwheel.
Next week I will discuss the other reasons we taught on a kickwheel before
moving on to a power wheel.
Frank Colson
www.R2D2u.com
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