Claypit maintenance

In preparation for an upcoming shoot, I have been working to make the claypit a bit smaller and deeper, and to work in some sand, to take away some of the clay’s “gloopiness”. I don’t know how else to describe it. The clay coats everything and seems to repel water so that it is always very thick. I experimented with adding sand and I liked the results. The sand adds some grittiness to the clay, but it stays suspended in the clay and makes the clay less impervious to water. The texture of the mix is more like mortar (concrete with no rock). The goal now is to get the clay and sand evenly mixed together. I’m mixing the sand and clay in about a 50-50 mixture and adding it to the pure clay, so in the end, the clay will still be 90% or more of the total volume of the pit. Check out this video of the process …

Claypit Maintenance 2011-05-13