Trim the whole pot before you ever take it off the wheel

A wooden knife, or the pointed end of a wooden modeling tool. Wood pushes soft clay less than steel does and leaves a matte cut rather than a smeared one. A needle tool works too and cuts finer, but it is less forgiving of a shaky hand.

About forty five degrees, tip pointing down and inward toward the center of the bat. Get the angle set in the air, a couple of inches away from the pot, and then bring the whole braced unit in. Adjusting the angle mid-cut is what produces a scooped bevel instead of a flat one.

Move in until the tip touches, then keep pushing at the same steady rate. Do not chase the clay. Let the wheel bring it to you. A ribbon should start peeling off almost immediately.

This is the number that matters. Go deeper and the pot is standing on almost nothing and can shift or tear loose. Stop short and the wire will pass below your bevel, which leaves a thin lip that chips off in the bisque.

The cut is not finished when you reach depth. It is finished when the ribbon stops coming off, which is the wheel telling you the circle is now actually a circle. Then withdraw the tool straight back out, never upward.

The ribbon usually stays hanging on. Pick it off with the tool tip or a dry finger. A wet sponge will round over the crisp edge you just spent four seconds making.

A barely damp chamois or one fingertip, wheel turning, almost no pressure. A sharp leather hard edge becomes a chipped bisque edge, and a chipped bisque edge stays sharp forever once it has been through a glaze fire at cone 5½.

Wheel stopped, wire pulled taut and held flat down against the bat, both hands low, one clean pull. On a bat, take the bat off the wheel and leave the pot alone until it can be handled. On a bare wheel head, dry your hands completely first, because there is no trimming session coming to remove your fingerprints.

At the top of the pad, where the wall stops being wall and starts being the bit that was holding it down. Usually a quarter to a half inch up from the bat. Any higher and you are cutting into the wall itself, which thins it exactly where the pot is heaviest.

Hold a square cornered tool flat and horizontal, tip aimed at the center of the pot, and push straight in about an eighth of an inch. Two revolutions. That single horizontal cut is the entire visual effect.

Turn the tool so its edge is vertical, keep the same distance in, and draw it down the new face toward the bat. You are carving a short cylinder out of the pad. Two or three passes, light ones.

Route A, exactly as written, taken from the bottom of your new vertical face down and in toward the bat. Now there are three surfaces where there used to be one.

Stop the wheel, crouch, and look straight across at the shoulder. It should be one clean circle. A shoulder that dips on one side means the pot was never centered, and no amount of extra cutting will make an off center circle round.

If the shoulder cuts in further than the pad flares out, you have made an overhang, and an overhang is a crack with a schedule. Keep the vertical face at or outside the line of the wall above it.

Same as Route A. Every cut edge gets one light pass. There are now three of them.

Measure it with the needle tool before the first pull. You cannot cut a recess into clay that is not there, and this is the one situation where a thick base is the correct answer rather than a confession.

Every curve, every rib pass, the whole interior. Once the pot firms up you are not reaching in there again, and an inside that does not match the outside is where thick spots hide.

Do not move it. Do not cover it. You want it somewhere between soft leather hard and leather hard: firm enough to hold a cut, soft enough to take one. In this desert that is often about an hour on a dry evening. In a wet month it can be three or four.

And here is the entire payoff of the route: it is still centered. No coils, no tapping, no chuck, no upside down guessing. The pot has not moved since you made it.

Wheel turning slowly, needle tip held lightly against the pad, and let it scribe the outer edge of the ring and then the inner edge. A ring between a quarter and a half inch wide. On a bowl, put it somewhere around two thirds of the way out from the center, because a foot too close to the middle makes the bowl rock and a foot at the very edge makes it look like a bucket.

Route A, from your outer circle down to the bat. Doing the outside first means the ring is already the right width when you start on the recess, so you are only worrying about one edge at a time.

Working from the inner circle, angle a wooden knife or a small loop up and in under the pot. Take thin passes. Every few passes, stop the wheel and push the needle tool up through the recess to read how much floor is left above you. This is the step where pots get holes in them, and the needle tool is the only thing that prevents it.

Where the ring meets the recess there is a sharp inside angle, and a sharp inside angle concentrates every bit of shrinkage stress into one line. A small radius there, with the tool or a damp sponge, removes an entire category of cracking for about five seconds of work.

The pot is now standing on a much smaller footprint than it was, so the wire wants to go through flat and slow. Then leave it on the bat to dry, and dry it slowly, because a foot ring and a floor are two different thicknesses drying next to each other.

Three or four firm passes with a rib from the center outward, wheel turning. This is not a formality. On a pot that will never be trimmed, this is the only compression the floor is ever going to get, and it is the entire defense against an S shaped crack showing up two weeks later.

Hold a straight rib flat across the floor with the wheel stopped and look for light under it. A floor that bulges upward in the middle becomes a pot that rocks, and a floor that dishes downward becomes a pot that holds a puddle.

Not a cut, just a soft roll of the corner where the wall meets the bat. A hard ninety degree corner is the single most chip prone shape in ceramics. Ten seconds with the curved edge of a rib fixes it permanently.

A smooth wire leaves a plain flat cut. A twisted wire leaves a pattern of ridges that is a legitimate decorative finish and shows up beautifully under a runny glaze. Neither is a mistake. The mistake is not deciding.

Wheel stopped, wire taut and pressed flat against the bat, one steady pull, gives you a flat cut. Wheel turning slowly with the wire held into the base gives you a spiral. Both work. Do not do half of each.

A flat board or a flat shelf. Not a warped bat, not a wrinkled sheet of newspaper. A flat bottomed pot copies whatever surface it dries on and it copies it permanently.

Any foot can come out of a kiln rougher than you wanted. A wet diamond pad takes it down in about ten seconds and it is the last step of a lot of good pots. What can and cannot be rescued after a firing is covered on the fixing pottery page.