Just like everybody else on the east coast of Australia just now, we have had a lot of rain.

Luckily, we only had 165mm. Some places had double that. But ours came all in a short sharp deluge over night. It fell onto saturated soil. 

So the water flowed freely across the ground and down the slope into our dams.

The dams soon filled and overflowed. We now have 3 new streams flowing across our land. They will not be permanent. All this water will soon drain away, but we will not be able to drive a vehicle, or even a ride on mower down there for a very long time.

Because we can’t work out side at the moment. I have been prepping for the up-coming sericite porcelain weekend workshop.

I stripped down the stainless steel twin auger pug mill and cleaned out the previous porcelain body mix. The Venco twin auger pug is very quiet and very fast at processing clay. I really like using it, but I don’t like having to clean it out! It is one of the slowest pugs to take to bits and clean out.

Twin auger design pugs are very good at mixing/puging. The sericite that I am working with now is 8 years old and although it was well wrapped, it had stiffened a little bit over time. An excellent feature of the twin auger design is that you can just dribble in extra water in with the stiff clay to soften it up. Normal single auger pugs that I have don’t handle this very well. I’ve tried it. The clay/water mix just slides around and no mixing takes place. However this is not the case with the twin auger design. One other very important feature of this pug mill is that it is entirely fabricated out of Stainless steel, so very suitable for use with porcelain bodies.

I spent half a day getting it working and puging the 1/4 of a tonne of porcelain, ready for the workshop next weekend.

I bought this pug mill 2nd hand after the fire. It came from a deceased estate. I was dying to own one of these stainless steel twin auger pug mills, and was lucky enough to find someone was dying, to sell it to me.