Pugmill: Labor Saving Equipment for my Labor labor

 

My family's first order of business: put googly eyes on the pug mill

This week I added a piece of equipment to my studio that I never thought I'd own. I bought a pugmill! A pugmill is basically a tool for mixing, reclaiming, recyling, and preparing clay. In my first clay job, teaching clay and other art classes for the city of Cedar Rapids, we used a pugmill for recycling all waste clay. We'd lay out the slurry into indentations in plaster slabs, mix in some dry powder, let it dry for a while, then put it all in the pugmill to mixing. I remember really loathing that beast, maybe just because the process was physical and slow. We also have a pug mill in the Yakima Valley College clay studio. In the old building, when we didn't have a mixer, it was the only way to recycle clay, but I rarely did the work because my work studies were in charge of it. Maybe my lingering dislike of the Cedar Rapids pugmill explains why I was surprised to find myself interested in buying a pugmill for my home studio.

The pug mill before its first use.

The way it works, from the users perspective, is pretty simple: You put some clay in the hopper, close the lid, push the mix button, and the auger mixes the clay up better and much faster than if a person were recyling and mixing clay by hand (or foot). You can then set the mixer to pug and it will push the clay out the front. This particular model, a VMP9 "power wedger" by Peter Pugger, can mix wet and dry clay, and they say, even bone dry clay, though I haven't tried it yet. This machine is also a de-airing pugmill, meaning it has a vacuum that can pull the air out of the mixing clay. This is like what happens when hand-wedging before throwing.

my pugmill in action

In the old building at YVC we used our larger PeterPugger for all of our clay recycling, which meant that my work study students were using it daily. In the new building we have a mixer and a pug mill, which enables us to use regularly recycle two types of clay (without cleaning out the pugmill and without mixing up the clay bodies).  The mixer also allows us to make bigger batches at a time and we can more easily get beginning students involved in the process.

Some of the worst of the poorly recycled clay from this summer--pretty, maybe, but not nice to work with.

I've always simply hand mixed (or foot mixed) my clay reclaim in my home studio using stack wedging or turning it into a whole event involving kids' feet in the back yard, but lately I've noticed that the recycled clay just didnt' feel great. Also, and partly contributing to the poor quality of the clay, it feels like I have so little time in the studio that I resent the recyling process and end up screwing it up. I don't time the recyling process particularly well, leaving clay out to dry longer than I should or rushing the process. The result is clay that is too dry, or wet and dry clay mixed together. 

hand-recycled clay on the left, pugged clay on the right

The first batch of clay I recycled in the new pugmill was a batch I had recycled and stack wedged this summer. As you can see, the clay had striations of different clays within it. The different clays also had different consistencies, with some harder and some softer. After just minutes in the pugmill, the clay was soft, smooth, and even in both color and consistency. 

reycling bone dry clay from this summer

Since then I've slaked some dry clay leftover from the summer and put it in the pugmill with similarly fast and good results. The pugmill has a 25lb capacity, which I've filled and emptied about three times this week and the results are all consistent. Since I'm not throwing with this clay, the de-airing feature isn't really important, but I tried it anyway.

The view inside the hopper partway through loading

The pugmill is so easy and fast, its almost hard to believe I waited this long to buy one. On the other hand, I believe the pugmill is the single most expensive object I've ever purchased that goes inside a house (assuming a college education doesn't fit inside a single building). My husband says the pugmill is worth more than my car. It wasn't a Christmas gift, I very specifically bought it with some of the money that I'll be making from my union leadership position. Since I don't get time off, I'm doing the union job on top of my full time teaching, so I wanted to buy something that I could see for that work. As it turned out, I bought a labor saving piece of equipment in exhange for my Labor union labor. It feels right.

The pugmill after my husband brought it home

I ordered it in early December figuring that it would take a long time to arrive during the pandemic. It was going to take 6-8 weeks to arrive, but Clay Art Center in Tacoma had a slightly larger model than I intended to buy, in stock. My husband drove over on Monday to pick it up, and as an extra bonus, it was already assembled so we skipped a little bit of that work. At it turns out the larger version fits perfectly in the space reserved for it (when my husband remodeled the studio last year) and mixes a nice sized batch of clay--about double what the smaller version would have. Double bonus, Clay Art Center's service is always excellent, and the pugmills are made in the USA.

The pugmill in situ next to the wedging table and potters wheel

Classes ended last Friday, finals were over this week, and grades submitted Thursday. I'm not quite done with my union committments, but already this past week, I've been able to spend time in the studio on three separate days this week! I'm looking foward to more this weekend and next week. With COVID eliminating the posssibilty of holiday travel, I'm hoping to trade some of my usual airport layover time for quality studio time. 

What I started with the newly mixed clay