Homemade Pottery Wheel

Hey guys, thought I’d share my homemade pottery wheel adventure with you as I often get asked “how the hell?!” – if it’s of interest, please read on 🙂

I took to pottery in August this year and I’ve been hooked ever since, every week attending a class with everything you’d ever need. Skip ahead a few months and I’ve now got my own little Instagram account, PotrePots and I’m potting away on my homemade wheel!

The DIY homemade pottery wheel

It wasn’t long until I found myself wanting to work on my new found hobby more than once a week at the pottery class so I started to look online for pottery wheels. Yikes! A nice pottery wheel is expensive!

The solution? Let’s make one!

Now this isn’t a new idea, I used a lot of advice shared by Colemishler on his pottery wheel post which gave me all the requirements – yeah… this is doable.

I won’t bore you with the processes as it was pretty scattered if I’m honest, but below is all the materials I used along with some handy photos that might help you create your own wheel too.

Materials used:

The wheel

You’ll probably notice that there are variations of the wheel throughout these photos – that’s because it was very much a “trial by error”. For example, I used two washing up bowls for a splash guard first (so I can separate them to clean everything) but couldn’t seal it enough when the two pieces were together.

I opted to use a flexible plastic tub in the end and simply remove the wheel head when cleaning.