It feels great to have finished up all the pugging of my ceramic clay just before we start to hit freezing during the nights!

De-Aired Clay Pugs 12 rows wide x 3 rows deep x 7 rows up.

It took me about 4 straight days of pugging (10 hour days) to reclaim about 1000 pounds of useable clay.

Wet and Dry Scrap Clay Combined in Pugmill Mixer

Then add in time of lugging the buckets up and wet clay back down… Pshew!

Dry Scrap Clay into Pugmill

Here is what it looks like adding a bunch of the dry scrap (both bone dry and leather-hard).

Clay slurry into pugmill with dry clay.

And here is the slurry that I also had – this is like muck and slime – completely saturated particles of clay in water.

Pug of Clay starting to emerge de-aired from pugmill.

Hard to believe that after just 5-10 minutes of mixing once you get the proportions of dry and wet right, you get clay coming out that is totally usable.

Finally done with the buckets!

And out of all of these buckets I have been using for years and years, I am finally able to get down to keeping just about 8. The rest will be put into the recycle bin and made into something else down the road.

Pugmill put away for the winter.

And now we can have our garage back. The pugmill is all cleaned up, sealed up, and ready to chill out until spring.

I plan on throwing quite a bit on the wheel this winter and I really hope that I can use this machine more regularly to get my money’s worth out of it.