Pug Mill

A mean, unclean, man-eating machine for mixing, compressing and extruding clay, useful for recycling scrap clay. Also useful for destroying anything else mistakenly fed into it, which you will then find chips of in your clay exactly where you don't want them. Make sure not to mix up and recycle your tools with your clay. Or your hands, arms, etc. Modern pug mills have small openings to feed the clay into, in an attempt to prevent careless and tragic accidents. I have an old-school monster with a big, beautiful, wide-open toothy maw that will swallow anything, including bucketfulls of clay; it's like having my very own pet great white shark. I love it. But I don't let the students feed it. At all.

The open hopper of the pug mill. You can see the screw that runs through it, that chews up and combines the clay, slowly pushing it to the left toward the extruding chamber.

The mixed clay being extruded out of the mill.

The poster above the pug mill.