How to make your own plaster bat for the pottery wheel

Antoinette Badenhorst and David Voorhees, both professional potters and teachers at TeachinArt show how to make plaster wheel bats for the pottery wheel. This demonstration was presented during the recording of David's e-course Porcelain Tips For Wheel Pottery at the studio of Antoinette in Saltillo Mississippi.

Mima Boskov from South Africa plaster bats

​Mima Boskov is a South African potter who completed the Understanding Porcelain e-course of Antoinette Badenhorst at Teachinart.
She learned in the online workshop how to make a plaster bat for her pottery wheel and then she decided to create her own version of the plaster bat. That is why TeachinArt is a platform for Artists who teach Artists. Mima is a typical example of one of the success stories of online teaching.

Here is Mima's explanation in her own words.

I took up pottery a few years ago, in an attempt to discover my Creative Self, liberate the Inner Child, find the Artist Within - ah, you've heard it all before: mid-life crisis and how to solve it...

I've been wedging, throwing, despairing, buying books, Googling and reading articles with genuine passion ever since. 

I'm still waiting for the Artist, but I've revealed a determined Artisan Within, and sure have hatched an Inner Gyro Gearloose (for the younger among us, that's the whacky inventor from Donald Duck cartoons). The hatchling grew out of my frustration with relatively poor choice of pottery tools in South Africa: no Mudtools, no Griffin Grip, no Strongarm centering tool, no plaster bat mold systems... So many tempting goodies that one can glimpse on internet pages, but can't source locally. Ordering online involves shipping and import duties, and the price becomes extravagant.

There is an Afrikaans saying in my country: "'n Boer maak 'n plan".

It literally means "the farmer makes a plan", but is used when lateral thinking helps one find a novel and ingenious way of surmounting an obstacle.

I realized that being the Boer with 'n plan and making my own pottery tools gives me almost as much pleasure and sense of achievement as making pots.

We needed plaster bats for the Understanding Porcelain course. I had been trying to develop a plaster bat system for my wheel for a while, and a detail from Antoinette's drawing made everything click together. 

Mima Boskov is a South African potter who completed the Understanding Porcelain e-course of Antoinette Badenhorst at Teachinart.
She learned in the online workshop how to make a plaster bat for her pottery wheel and then she decided to create her own version of the plaster bat. That is why TeachinArt is a platform for Artists who teach Artists. Mima is a typical example of one of the success stories of online teaching.

Here is Mima's explanation in her own words.

I took up pottery a few years ago, in an attempt to discover my Creative Self, liberate the Inner Child, find the Artist Within - ah, you've heard it all before: mid-life crisis and how to solve it...

I've been wedging, throwing, despairing, buying books, Googling and reading articles with genuine passion ever since. 

I'm still waiting for the Artist, but I've revealed a determined Artisan Within, and sure have hatched an Inner Gyro Gearloose (for the younger among us, that's the whacky inventor from Donald Duck cartoons). The hatchling grew out of my frustration with relatively poor choice of pottery tools in South Africa: no Mudtools, no Griffin Grip, no Strongarm centering tool, no plaster bat mold systems... So many tempting goodies that one can glimpse on internet pages, but can't source locally. Ordering online involves shipping and import duties, and the price becomes extravagant.

There is an Afrikaans saying in my country: 'n Boer maak 'n plan.

It literally means "the farmer makes a plan", but is used when lateral thinking helps one find a novel and ingenious way of surmounting an obstacle.

I realized that being the Boer with 'n plan and making my own pottery tools gives me almost as much pleasure and sense of achievement as making pots.

We needed plaster bats for the Understanding Porcelain course. I had been trying to develop a plaster bat system for my wheel for a while, and a detail from Antoinette's drawing made everything click together. 

Rubber grommet

​For my plaster bats, I used two pieces of dowel (10 mm diameter dowel - matching the diameter of wheel pins - cut to 15 mm length), and a lucky find from a hardware store, electrical department, called "rubber grommet". I have no clue what is it actually meant to be used for, but I browse hardware stores with enthusiasm that normal females reserve for shoe shops, always on a lookout for useful parts for my various projects.

Dowels with the rubber grommet

​Before assembling it, I attached a clay coil to the edge of plastic bat, and built it into a thin wall (that came from Antoinette's drawing). ​​Sunlight dishwashing liquid is a good mold release

​I inserted wooden dowels in the plastic bat holes, and put grommets on them. ​For my 25 cm plastic bat, I used 500 ml of water, and as much plaster as water would hold, and poured it on the bat. ​

After half an hour, the clay wall can be taken off, and the plaster smoothed out with a metal ruler. The sides can be tidied up with a Sureform blade and green scouring pad.

​​In another half hour, plaster can be taken off the plastic bat, using a thin spatula. After removing the dowels, the rubber grommets stay safely embedded in the underside of the bat, so the whole thing can be attached to the wheel head pins, and reused many times without damaging the plaster. A thin rubber mat on the wheel head helps secure the bat

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