The Usefulness of Chucks @floriangadsby

Uploaded July 2025 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago

I adore chucks. They’re such simple, versatile tools and I have a whole box of them, wrapped in plastic sheeting, preserved for the next time they need to be used. The one in this short video is more than two years old and after each use it’s given a good dunk in water and then it’s wrapped up tightly in plastic and stored back in the airtight box hence it came.

I have some for bowls, others for my thrown ink dip pens, if you can remember those, some taller tapering shapes and some smaller ones, like this, for cups of various sizes.

Now, I’ve always preferred using leather hard chucks, storing them is a pain but it’s easy at least. The other option is to the bisque fire them, then you soak them when needed and hopefully the moisture retained is enough to help the pot stick. You can even smear soft clay onto the bisque fired chuck in order to make their surfaces even tackier, yet I found they never held the pots quite as nicely as chucks made from leather hard clay. The truth is, probably both work wonderfully, it’s just we tend to lean into preferences and then you’re stuck making pots in ‘your’ way.

I should make a more thorough YouTube video all about the creation of chucks, if that’s something you’d like to see do let me know!

#tools #toolsofthetrade #pottery #clay #howto #potterytutorial #ceramics

How I Trim Pottery with More Control (Turning a Bottle using a Chuck)

$Throwing 1000’s of Mugs When I’m making mugs, I like to make lots at once. Generally, this means spending a week or two producing 100-200 pieces, whilst juggling a number of other tasks, mainly, as I feel as if by working on so many at once, they end up being more consistent and I become faster as I’m repeating the creation process so many times in a row. It sort of feels like practice and I can always sense a difference in my ability at the beginning of a mug making session, versus how naturally they are formed and handled towards the end, after I’ve warmed up, essentially. I throw mine from 300 grams of clay, (plus or minus 10 for speedier weighing out), to 11 cm tall by 8.5 cm wide, give or take a few millimetres. I don’t mind if one is a smidge below my throwing gauge’s pointer as I pull up the walls, or if one is fractionally too wide, as these minute discrepancies will barely be noticeable once the pot has been trimmed, handled, glazed and fired. What I do care about though are the proportions and the slightly tapering shape. It can hard to see, but these pots are marginally wider at the base and then they slope inwards ever so slightly as they reach upwards. It’s subtle but it makes a big difference and so, if I notice that a mug is too straight, or that it flared out towards the top, it’ll be instantly destroyed if I can’t fix that during the throwing process itself. It’s good to be brutal, you can never be too precious, essentially with vessels as simple as these are. Lifting off these thinly walled pots in the perhaps the trickiest part. There’s a bit of a knack to it, (that’s better explained in my YouTube video that specifically covers this step), but it means I can heap more onto each ware board, which means I don’t have to use batts and for a pot like this that means I end up saving a bit more space in the studio. Space, as you quickly realise, is perhaps one of the most importance things about a potter’s studio. It’s a bottleneck you’ll often run into and you need more space during the production stage, as pots need room to dry and components eat up shelves before they’re assembled. 100 more to go… #mugs #handmade #craft #wheelthrownpottery #pottery$

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