Ceramics class?

I’m hoping to be able to get into the beginning ceramics course taught through adult education at Santa Cruz High.  It is one of those courses where the registration opens at a specific time, and if you aren’t on the computer obsessively refreshing, then you might not get in. (I’m not telling when the window opens—I don’t want more people competing for the slot!)

Although I have long had a fondness for pottery as objects, I’ve never learned to shape clay myself. I don’t expect to get good at it, but it should be fun to learn first-hand how much skill is involved.

I do have one specific project I’m interested in doing—replacing a broken (and badly mended) soap dish.

I had two of these soap dishes, but at various times they have been knocked off the counter in the bathroom and broken. This one was mended with superglue, but I’d really like to replace it.

I can’t remember who we bought the soap dishes from originally (I showed one to a few potters that I thought might have made it, but they did not recognize it as anything they or anyone they knew made), so now I’m thinking of making one myself. I think it should be a doable project for the beginning ceramics course.

One of the potters I showed it to suggested that the soap dish had been made with a clay extruder, which seems extremely likely to me. I sent email to the instructor of the ceramics course, asking about whether there was a clay extruder available in the studio. There is, but she did not know what model, and she suggested that I wait to see whether I get into the course before looking into it further.

I decided to start designing a clay-extruder die to roughly match the cross-section of the soap dish. I used SVG (manually edited as text, but viewed with Inkscape) to create the outline. I then printed a thin piece of plastic with half the outline cut out, to see how close I had come. It took me 3 iterations to get an SVG file that satisfied me as being close enough.

Here is a PNG rendition (from Inkscape) of the 3D shape. The image is upside down (because Inkscape has positive Y down the page).

I looked around for ways to create custom extruder dies, and found that there are various materials used for the dies: ⅛” aluminum,  ½” HDPE, marine-grade plywood, and 3D-printed PLA. I have no way to do precision cutting of aluminum, HDPE, or plywood (though I could probably get a membership at Idea Fab Labs and learn to use their CNC mill), so I decided to try designing for 3D printing, even though my 3D printer is not big enough for the approximately 112mm square dies used by the North Star extruders. I can find other 3D printers around town or on campus and use them, if needed.

I used OpenSCAD to create the model. It was very easy to do a simple linear extrusion of the SVG file, but the clay extruder dies I’ve found online all have heavily beveled edges on the top side of the die, to compress the clay as it enters the die. That was a bit harder to manage in OpenSCAD.  I ended up using the openSCADbezier.py plugin for Inkscape to convert the SVG file into an OpenSCAD file that could generate points along the curve, then I used the BOSL2 library for OpenSCAD to generate an offset outline for the entrance shape on the top surface of the die and to “skin” between the exit shape and the entrance shape. I had to fix one bug in openSCADbezier.py, as it had a check for strings that only worked in Python 2, not Python 3.

Here is an image of the STL file showing the beveled edge on the top of the die.

I don’t think that I’ll end up printing this STL file, as it would take 40 hours to print on an Ultimaker 3 (at 0.1mm resolution and 100% fill). I could make a cruder version in about 5 hours (at 0.2 mm resolution and 30% fill), but I don’t know whether it would be strong enough to withstand the pressure of the clay. Even if I never 3D print this die, it was fun figuring out how to create it in OpenSCAD.

I looked for other ways to convert my design to an actual die and found a few:

1. I could use a commercial 3D printing service, but ones like Shapeways would charge around $140.
2. I could get North Star (who make extruders) to use their CNC mill to make one for about $40 out of HDPE. I’d have to get them the SVG file somehow, as their ordering procedure for custom dies involves making a hand sketch on a paper form! Update 2023 Jan 3: North Star no long offers this service. “Unfortunately, we have discontinued our custom die service until further notice. North Star is focusing primarily on production of our main product line. Equipment, manpower, and materials are dedicated solely to this effort. We will review our ability to offer custom die services sometime in 2023.”
3. I could order a 3D-printed custom die from a shop on Etsy (https://www.etsy.com/listing/1372088315/custom-die-for-clay-extruders) for about $12—the procedure for submitting the SVG file there is pretty clear.  I need to find out how solid the dies are and how well they hold up—I’ll need to decide between their cheap dies and the more expensive ones from North Star (which are almost certainly stronger and smoother). Update: I contacted the seller, and the dies are printed with 20% fill and 0.2 mm height, which Cura estimates would take about 4:25 to print. The seller claims that they work as well as the North Star dies, but hasn’t used them long enough to know how durable they are. Prices are likely to go up as they get more experience with selling them.
4. There is another Etsy shop selling custom dies for 4″ clay extruders, but they are a bit more expensive, and their images don’t show the beveling—I would certainly be better off with a North-Star-made die.
5. I could join Idea Fab Labs and learn to use their CNC mill, which would cost me at least $150 (for a one-month “pro” membership).
6. I could join Idea Fab Labs and 3D print there (I suspect that they’d allow a long print, especially if it was on one of their Ender 5 printers, rather than the more popular Prusas). But that would still cost me $110 for a one-month membership, and the 3D-printed version would probably not be as good as one milled by North Star.

Right now, I’m leaning towards getting a 3D printed die from the Etsy shop, since the price is low and I can live with wasting the money if the print fails. The North Star die is a safe backup.

But first, I have to get into the class and then find out what model extruder the classroom has.

Update 2023 Jan 6: I registered for the class successfully.