Handmade clay Ocarina

Hey guys, I’m Nate welcome back to the workshop in the past We’ve done a few different experiments using clay Including making our own clay that we found on the side of the riverbank and a couple of tests of firing clay in a barbecue Today we’re gonna try and build something specific out of clay and see if we can get it to work for this project I do Have some commercially available Ceramic clay instead of using the river clay the reason The reason I’m doing that is I might want to try firing the project we do today And I want to make sure that I’m using some clay that has the proper mixture of grog or other additives to make sure that It fires correctly without cracking too much our River clay can fire, but so far It’s got some serious problems with cracking And I haven’t quite nailed down the formula of what to do to stop that from happening There’s plenty of places where you can buy ceramic clay commercially a lot of hobby stores carry or I got this 25 pound block on Amazon where surprisingly cheap we’ll put a link down in the description if you prefer to do that the goal is To take this clay in to shape it into a functional musical instrument We’re going to try to make a clay Ocarina all we’re going to need is a handful size ball of clay a little bit of water and a few popsicle sticks This is a water-based clay, so it can dry out So I’m just gonna break off the piece that I need and then seal the plastic bag so the rest of it doesn’t go bad There we go this ball slightly smaller than my fist is probably more than enough, so we’ll just set that aside Close up the rest this play Sort of just trying to squeeze extra air out of the bag now That we have our clay I want to prep our popsicle sticks to shape them just a little bit into more useful tools The shaping on these sticks is going to be very basic and quick I want a flat edge on one end of the popsicle stick so let’s cut it to the shape we need Now let’s just take a little bit of sandpaper smooth that cut down and taper it on one side so it’s sloped You can now see that the front of this popsicle stick Sort of slopes down into a chisel shape that’ll make it easier to get some of the details we need in our clay Let’s do the same thing to the other three popsicle sticks You might only need two of these, but I like to have a couple of backups Before we start sculpting the clay into the shape of our ocarina.

Let’s spend a couple minutes Just throwing it down on the table. This will help force out any air bubbles that could cause problems when you fire it There we go our clay is pretty well wedged I think meaning most of the air bubbles have been forced out of it And that’s what we want that means it’s a lot less likely to burst when we put it in the kiln So now let’s start by breaking our clay up into three pieces one smaller piece Which we’ll set aside for a moment smaller than a golf ball bigger than a marble penny in between those two Now we want to take the rest of our little play ball and divide it in half Doesn’t need to be perfectly in half just mostly in half will work pretty well Now what we need to do is form our clay into the shape of the body of an ocarina I am going to try to get a sort of teardrop shape for my ocarina and see if we can get that to work Just start by rolling it at a little bit of a taper.

That’s gonna give us narrow. End and a wide end Then just can use my thumb and pinch this out, so we have sort of a long teardrop shaped dish and go that looks pretty good just Flip it up head down and press it down a little bit so our edges are all meeting the table That means you’re gonna have one flat plane surface now that we’ve got our first half made. Let’s make another one just like it That’s a pretty good nice hollow Shape let’s do the same thing flip it upside down and make sure that the edge is coming all the way down to the table All the way around it now This is looking pretty good But I think I actually want to spread it out and make it a little bit flatter and wider, so I’m gonna try doing that sort of Widen it up a little bit on both of them there we go if we can just Visualize putting those two together.

I think we’re starting to see a pretty decent ocarina shape now we have our two halves I’m just gonna smooth them out a little bit It’ll probably end up getting a little bit messed up later as we’re adding on other parts and making it all work But just for the heck of it. Let’s smooth down the outside a little bit There we go we’ve got our two halves and now what we need to do is put them together and get them to stay connected Really well one thing that really helps with this is if we score the two sides of clay I’m just gonna take the back of this knife Make some scratch marks all along the outside Ridge here Now I’m going to add just a little bit of water going all the way around one side Now let’s press the two sides together add just a little bit of pressure We really want them to stick pretty well sometimes you can even see a little bit of water starting to ooze out It’s a good sign Now I’m just going to use my fingers and thumbs Try and smear the clay down over the seam, so we have a nice permanent bond Now this sort of Teardrop or almond shaped piece of clay is full of air the whole thing’s Hollow would probably float if we put it on water Right now, but it’s a water-based clay, and that could sort of make it dissolve a little bit So I’m not gonna do that but this is where we’re trying to get to we now have a hollow piece of clay shaped somewhat Like a teardrop or almond moving on to the next stage We’re gonna grab our little piece of clay that we set aside and one of our popsicle stick tools Let’s form the piece of clay into a sort of flattened cylinder so first.

I’m just going to roll it that’s longer than we need Press it down Pull it again there. We go. This is just a little bit over an inch long You can see it’s a good sized little cylinder now I’m just going to take a couple of fingers and smush it down a little bit flat. Not all the way It’s somewhat flat so what we’re going to do is this is going to be our mouthpiece Which attaches to our ocarina about right here the side of our ocarina is sloped? So let’s take a knife and cut our mouthpiece at a similar angle so that will fit nicely on to the side There we go we can see that’s a much better matchup than when it was just the square end Now before we attach it we want to take our popsicle stick get it wet in our cup of water And then we want to run the popsicle stick through the length of this piece of clay that’s going to be our mouthpiece There we go we have that popsicle stick going in one side traveling all the way through the mouthpiece And sticking out about an inch on the other side now holding onto the popsicle stick not the mouthpiece itself We’re going to push the popsicle stick through the side wall of the body of the ocarina Once you actually punched through the clay wall sort of has a lot more give to it And we don’t want our mouthpiece sticking straight out from the side We want it kind of angled down this way the popsicle stick inside the mouthpiece is Angled so that it lines up approximately with the roof of our ocarina We have that hole now I’m just going to do the same scoring on this clay that I did when I put the other pieces together Water There we go now we’re gonna press this back on I’m gonna try and press our mouthpiece into the clay we want to get it to bond, but of course We don’t want to push it so hard that it collapses the body of the ocarina At this point what we have is a hollow body that will be in the sound chamber for our ocarina and a tube coming off Of it and that’s where we’re gonna blow the air into the instrument just to check I’m gonna see if we can still slide this popsicle stick in and out Because we don’t want it to grip too hard on to the size of the clay you can see that as the popsicle stick has Absorbed water it started getting more of the clay stuck to it.

I’m just gonna scrape that off Now I’ll dip the stick in our water again, and I’m gonna put it back into the mouthpiece in ocarina Just the same way it was before We now want to take a second popsicle stick and use it to start carving out a hole for the music will be played So let’s get that popsicle stick wet the same way we did it the first one and now we need to start using it to Cut into our clay just barely after where the mouthpiece meets the body of the clay we want to cut down into the clay lined up with where our first popsicle stick is you can see if the Edges of this popsicle stick were visible.

It’d be about right here and here so I’m gonna take this popsicle stick and cut down into the clay and try and hit the first popsicle stick and Go this should cut through the clay fairly easily And then of course it stops when it hits the popsicle stick so we now have a little slot going down in there This is tapered so it’s just hitting in one point. You can’t see either popsicle stick down in that. Hole yet What we want to do is about the same width of our popsicle stick We then want to cut another slot that goes down And hits the first possible stick In fact we can go on all four sides. We just want a square piece here. That’s kind of cut out now I’m going to use this popsicle stick and just sort of scoop out the piece of clay That we’ve just cut at this point you can see a little bit of the popsicle stick that’s running through the mouthpiece into the body Let’s just try and carve away the clay down in there until we can see a nice square piece of popsicle stick Now we’ve got the body We’ve got the mouthpiece And we have a hole that leads down into the popsicle stick which is a channel from one to the other at this point let’s take one of our popsicle stick tools and try and add a 45-degree slope from the top of the ocarina Down to the point where this hole meets the popsicle stick This side of the clay meets the popsicle stick right here at the back of our square hole And that’s where we want the base of our slope to be so we’re going to slope from this point Back to about right here Start taking a little bit of clay off at a tone We can now see the clay running from the top of the ocarina Sloping down at about a 45 degree angle to where it runs into this popsicle stick Now let’s try to gently slide the first popsicle stick out of the ocarina body and mouthpiece One thing we want to do is verify that the very edge At the bottom of our slope is nice and straight You can see that as I pulled the popsicle stick out it got a little bit Wavy, so, I’m just gonna use the tools and see if I can straighten that out a little bit oh That’s not perfect, but it’s a fairly straight edge.

I’m down here at the bottom There’s this shelving plate and one thing we want to make sure is that it sticks farther into the ocarina body Than this piece of clay on the top at this point if everything has been done correctly We should be able to blow into it and get a musical tone Hey, we got it to work Beautiful, I’ll let you know this one actually worked on the first try which is I think the first time I’ve ever had this succeed The first time I did it this setup is very finicky and Fiddly and a lot of the time you’re going to need to tinker with it and toy with it a lot before you really get a nice tone if you blow into it, and you just get a Sound then you’re just going to need to keep playing with it and make sure you have every different point lined up Just the way it needs to be Sounds kind of like a train whistle Not bad Ceramic clay is non-toxic if you actually eat any of the clay it might plug up your digestive tract a little bit And that’s not gonna be comfortable, so you don’t want to eat your clay, but if it gets on your mouth a little bit It’s not something you have to worry about this actually works fairly Well, so let’s do a little bit of cosmetic clean-up to make it look nicer on the outside At this point our ocarina is functioning, but it only plays one note So it’s really kind of more of a whistle than an ocarina What we need to do is add some finger holes that will let us change the tones I’ll admit I’m actually not an expert on where how many what size of holes should be put into an ocarina? To really get the best variety of notes So I’m just gonna take a drill bit Start carefully adding some holes to it and see if they’ll help me change the tone at all Trying to sort of figure out where I’d put my fingers, and I’m just gonna try putting holes in that spot well Here’s one right here.

Let’s see what happens if a Drill a nice little hole right here Well the first hole works, let’s see if we can add a second one I’m gonna try putting this hole over where this finger should go It’s a different tone, but it’s only a very slight change I wonder if I need to make that hole a little bit bigger to get the higher pitch that I’m looking for It’s definitely higher It’s not beautiful it plays and it makes different notes which are Definitely important features as you can hear it’s not like the nicest richest tone And I think part of that is that even though I’ve been using a drill bit some little bits of clay are now sticking down into the body of the ocarina and that doesn’t help with the Sound really flowing through it very nicely.

I’m gonna see if I can take my exacto knife I’m gonna try and cut a hole into the body of the ocarina and smooth out the surface where I drilled the sound holes All right, I think I managed to smooth down the area around the holes a little bit now Let’s use this same piece of clay and plug up the hole that we cut All right, let’s see if it still plays after we cut the bottom off Yeah, I think that’s pretty good, I think that really did help bring out the tone again Doesn’t quite work for the Zelda songs That’s the best, it sounded yet, well, I think if I keep adding holes to it. I might ruin it like I said I’m not a professional ocarina maker This is just sort of a fun toy instrument that you can make at home just using some clay And I’m pretty happy with how this one has turned out.

It’s got a good shape to it. I’ve got four different tones I might even try adding a few more holes once. It’s dried out more when the clay is more dry I should be able to drill into it without pushing it out the bottom It will act more like a particulate Which the drill bit should be able to get out easily if you’re trying to make your own ocarina And you’re having problems getting it to produce a tone. I’ve made a little diagram that might help you troubleshoot What the problem is this whole image is a cross-section of the ocarina if we were to take a very sharp knife and cut? It from this point all the way back through This is what we would see if we looked at it on the side, so this right here is the mouthpiece This right here is the 45-degree slope that we have in our ocarina This is the inside of the chamber a couple of things we need to look out for this distance right here is Approximately the same as the width of your popsicle stick this will give us a nice square shape looking down into the hole We have made in the ocarina the bottom piece of clay should extend out farther than the top piece of clay you should be able to look down into the ocarina and See this little lip of clay sticking out farther than this bit another common problem is for this edge to be the wrong shape it needs to be a nice clean line and Approximately a 45 degree angle there are two important things going on with this point of the clay as well the first is that this point needs to be in between the top of our air channel and the bottom of our air channel I Found I have a little bit more success if it’s slightly above the middle But it should be lower than the height of the top of our air channel The other point to look out for is that the air needs to be traveling into the ocarina split on this 45 degree angle And then be traveling right along the roof of the ocarina where it will swirl around in the side What we can’t have is for the air to go in and then have a large Cavity that goes up we don’t want this 45 degree angle to be pointing down into the cavity So this is what we don’t want we don’t want our air to come in hit the angle of the clay and then have to go up and around you can see here that it travels in and Can go right into a smooth swirling motion here When it goes in and gets split against our 45 degree angle you would have to go up into the chamber before it started moving So we need to avoid that and make sure we follow this the way we do that is when we’re first putting our popsicle The inside the clay body we don’t want it pointed at this angle We need to make sure that it’s lined up so that the popsicle stick is resting against the roof of the ocarina inside There you have it now You know how to make a working? Ocarina using just a little bit of ceramic clay and some popsicle sticks this might work pretty well with other types of clay as well I haven’t personally tried any air dry clay Or baked dry clays I should warn you I do not recommend you try this with any polymer clays likes kopi or fimo as those Can be toxic and you really don’t want to be putting them in your mouth? Thanks for joining us for this project today We look forward to the next one talk to you then I Need another hole to keep playing the song Can’t go high enough to finish it pressing clay down into the body of the ocarina and messing with the tone Hey guys if you are on twitter come follow me on twitter at the king of random It’s a great place to connect with me one on one That’s all I’m gonna say about that because if you want to you will and if you don’t you won’t

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