Monday, June 8, 2009

Hello? ... this thing on?

Well first day back to making pots.... except my wheel doesn't seem to be on...
After a couple dozen times of switching the on/off switch back and forth, unplugging/replugging the wheel and checking the circuit breaker, still no luck. So what's left to do? Take it apart of course.
Well after half an hour of poking around with my meter and discovering that it is indeed getting power everywhere that it should be I broke down and called Shimpo. The tech man at Shimpo was really nice. It took him about two seconds of questioning me to figure out what was wrong with the wheel. The new part is in the mail, and should be here in a couple of days.
Here is what the inside of a Shimpo whisper looks like for those who are curious.



I'm relieved that is sounds like it will be so easy to fix. Unfortunately I didn't leave all that much time to fill the kiln and now with the delay to get the wheel back up and going it looks like there will only be about 2 to 2.5 weeks to make pots for the kiln. We'll see I might look into pushing it back a little bit. 2 weeks is not much time to make pots, especially since Christy has had so little time to make pots. I hate to push a firing back though after we've already scheduled it. We'll see....
Joe

4 comments:

ang design said...

wow that's clean..

cookingwithgas said...

just when you think all is running smoothly.......I hope it is a Quick fix!

Anonymous said...

kinda scary to think there's a little computer in there and outside you're just slogging clay around... well, maybe i shouldn't presume that you're slogging, i'm slogging

Hitomi said...

Hello, Joe and Christy. Looks like you are doing very well up there.

I am sorry about your Shimpo wheel. Shimpo used to make nice and better wheels which had ring cone system. I have one in Japan still now and it's from 70's, and it's great one. Hope you can fix it as soon as possible.

We are now building wood kiln at home and it's super slow progress, but we enjoy doing that. We hope to see you soon. Hitomi