I have not done anything with ceramic for almost a year. I set up for it this spring, once the snow cleared the door to my shed, but I'm stuck on one thing. I need a couple of wooden shapes and I don't have a lathe to make them with.
I've painstakenly made exactly the shapes I want in ceramic, but to make them more than one per year, I would need a bore that has my interior shape, and a mold that is slightly larger than my external shape.
The bore can be made out of wood, because it will just be enlarging and shaping the hole in powder dry greenware. The mold needs to be made in plaster, but I would make the mold using the wooden shape as the "original".
I need a lathe, but can't justify the purchase for just two shapes. I keep telling myself that I should just take my designs down to the metal shop and have someone make them out of steel, but that probably cost more than a small wood lathe.
I am almost to the point of trying to mount a dowel on my power drill and rotate it while trimming it with my dremel tool. But that's just nuts. I need a lathe. But I just can't afford one.