How Dan throws pots taller than your kids.
If you have spent any time around the studio, you have seen them: Dan’s giants, the chest-high and taller sectional pots that make first-time visitors stop mid-sentence. People assume the trick is strength, or a special wheel, or forbidden clay. The actual trick is arithmetic plus patience plus a joining ritual repeated until it is boring, and every bit of it is learnable. This page is the honest breakdown: the humbling math of scale, the section method as Dan runs it, the clay that makes it possible, and the on-ramp for making your own first two-piece pot this month.
Dan’s chest-high sectional pots are arithmetic plus patience plus a joining ritual, repeated until boring. Below: the five truths of scale, the first-two-piece checklist, and one honest hour on video. The full method is one toggle away.
Giant pots in five truths
- The math humbles everyone. At a giant’s widest point, an entire 25-pound bag of clay adds only a few inches of height; the clay bill runs to hundreds of pounds.
- Nobody throws a giant. Everybody throws sections: ten to fifteen per pot, each a full throwing job, stacked over days.
- The loop is the whole method. Throw rings to a written caliper number, wait for soft leather hard, score and slip deeply, lower it straight, blend the seam until it vanishes, re-true on the wheel, repeat.
- The clay is heavy-grogged sculpture stoneware, bodies in the Half & Half and Soldate 60 family: tooth to stand during the build, and under roughly 2 percent absorption once fired to maturity at cone 5½.
- The calendar is a material. Days of joining, weeks of managed drying, and no shortcut anywhere; scale punishes hurry.
Start with the first-two-piece checklist below; every giant in the building began exactly there. The full method, band by band, is one toggle away.
The giants, and why they exist
Dan has been chasing big pots for years, long before this studio had a sign, and the giants are less a product line than a standing argument: that scale is a craft anyone can climb toward, one section at a time. A giant pot teaches everything smaller pots teach, just louder: centering discipline, wall evenness, joining, moisture management, and the patience to let clay set its own schedule.
They also do a quiet job for the whole studio. A room with a shoulder-high pot in it gives every member permission to think bigger than a mug, and half the point of writing this page is to hand that permission out formally. The method below is exactly what Dan does. None of it is secret; all of it is repetition, and the first one you finish will feel like a graduation, because it is: every skill on this hub shows up for roll call inside a giant.
The humbling math of scale
Here is the number that recalibrates everyone: at a giant pot’s widest point, an entire 25-pound bag of clay adds only a few inches of height. A few. Inches. Volume grows with the square of the diameter, so the wider the pot gets, the more clay every inch of climb devours, and intuition never stops being shocked by it.
- Ten to fifteen sections per pot. That is Dan’s working range for a true giant: the base, then ring after thrown ring, each one a full throwing job on its own, stacked and blended over days.
- The clay bill is measured in bags. Run the few-inches-per-bag math up a chest-high silhouette and you land in the hundreds of pounds of clay per pot. Giants are a logistics project wearing a pottery costume.
- Nobody throws a giant; everybody throws sections. No wall can support that much wet weight at once. The entire craft is making many modest, excellent cylinders and convincing them to become one pot, which is why the skills transfer straight down to a two-piece vase.
- The calendar is a material. Each section must stiffen before it can carry the next, and the finished pot dries for weeks under management. Scale does not reward speed anywhere, and it punishes it everywhere.
The method, the way Dan runs it
Strip away the spectacle and a giant is one loop, repeated ten to fifteen times with religious consistency:
- Throw the base heavy and true. A thick-walled, slightly stout base section with a dead-flat rim, because every section above will inherit its geometry. The rim gets measured with calipers and written down; that number now runs the project.
- Throw rings to the number. On separate bats, bottomless collars thrown to match the recorded diameter, walls even, rims flat. Consistency here is the whole game; our sections page drills the fundamentals.
- Wait for soft leather hard, on purpose. Each piece stiffens until it can bear weight without flexing but still welds. Too soft and the stack slumps; too dry and the joint is a future crack. Dan manages this with staggered throwing so something is always ready.
- Score, slip, lower, and marry. Both rims scored deep, slipped generously, the ring lowered on straight, then the seam compressed and blended inside and out until it is gone. The pot goes back on the wheel and gets re-trued after every marriage.
- Shape late, at the top. The belly, shoulder, and neck get their drama in the upper sections, where fresh clay still moves. The lower pot has one job by then: stand there and be structural.
- Dry it like it owes you money. Weeks under loose plastic, rotated, watched, with the rim and any thin drama zones babied hardest. The full doctrine lives on our drying page.
The clay that makes giants possible
Giants are a clay-body decision before they are anything else. Dan throws his in heavily grogged, sanded sculpture-grade stonewares, bodies in the family of Laguna’s Half & Half or Soldate 60, and the spec sheet explains why.
- Tooth is the skeleton. High grog and sand content stiffens the wet wall so each section stands under the next, resists slumping during the long build, and forgives the uneven drying a huge form invites. Smooth porcelain-adjacent bodies simply lie down on the job.
- Low absorption is the finish line. Fired to maturity, these bodies land under roughly 2 percent absorption: genuinely vitrified stoneware, dense and weatherable, so a finished giant can live anywhere from a gallery floor to a garden.
- Open bodies survive the fire. The same grog that helps the build opens the clay so a thick-and-thin colossus can vent moisture and ride thermal stress through the bisque and the cone 5½ glaze firing without drama.
- Pick from the shelf, not the internet. The whole family of big-work bodies is covered in our clay bodies guide, and any staff member can point you to which of the studio’s clays the big-pot crowd is throwing this season. Remember the house rule: studio clay only, always.
Three videos worth your evening
One video worth your evening
A master learning sectional work in public, failures included, which makes it the most honest hour on the subject. Reading gave you the loop; this is what it looks like when the loop meets real clay.
Sectional throwing is a rhythm sport, so watch it before you attempt it: one patient master documenting a full two-part build including the failures, one straight tutorial on stacking, and three minutes of expert large-throwing tips. A note on why the page is mostly words anyway: the videos show the marriage of two sections; reading is what hands you the math, the clay spec, and the loop you will repeat fifteen times. Watch for the seam, read for the plan.
Start yours: the first two-piece pot
Every giant in the studio started as somebody’s first two-section vase. Tap these off as you go; the list remembers your progress on this device.
The ones we get asked at the studio
How long does one giant actually take?
Days of throwing and joining spread across a week or more, because every section needs its stiffening window, and then weeks of managed drying before the pot ever sees a kiln. Add the bisque and the glaze firing and a giant is a month-scale relationship. That calendar is not a flaw in the method; it is the method.
Do the seams show on the finished pot?
Not if the marriage was done right. A deeply scored, well-slipped joint that gets compressed, blended, and re-trued on the wheel becomes continuous wall, and after glaze even Dan has to think about where the joints were. A seam that shows was a seam that got rushed, usually at the too-dry end of the window.
Will a giant even fit in the kiln?
That is the least romantic and most important design constraint in the whole project: the kiln’s interior, minus breathing room, is the hard ceiling on your ambition, and shrinkage does not save you because the pot must fit at its largest, which is bone dry going into the bisque. Check the studio’s kiln dimensions with staff before you design past them, and plan your giant to clear with margin.
Why stack thrown sections instead of coiling the whole thing?
Both are ancient, honorable answers to the same physics problem, and they trade different currencies: sections spend wheel skill to buy speed and symmetry, while coil-and-paddle spends rhythm and hand labor to buy freedom of form and truly heroic scale. Dan is a wheel creature, so the giants are sectional; the other path has its own page, our onggi guide, and the best big-pot potters study both.
Where this leads next
The giants started here. Yours can too.
Everything a two-piece pot needs is under this roof: 29 wheels, grogged clay on the shelf, kilns waiting at the end, and people who will cheer when your first stacked seam disappears. Green, Yellow, Purple or Black, whichever fits how often you can get here.
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