Customizable Ball Opener

A ball opener is a great accessibility tool to make throwing on the pottery wheel easier for people with certain types of hand or mobility issues. It can also be used by beginning (or any skill level) potters to make throwing on the wheel a little easier. 

This ball opener is customizable in Fusion 360 to modify for your needs. I am still a beginner potter and usually work with small amounts of clay, so the dimensions of the tool as published in this stl work well for my needs. If you have larger hands or can throw larger pots, you may need to customize the dimensions of this model in Fusion using the parameters function.

Customizing the Ball Opener

This project includes the editable f3d file, and you can customize this model in Autodesk Fusion 360. The width of handles, opener, and full tool as well as the desired depth of your pot are customizable through the parameter function in Fusion.  

These parameters are modifiable:

• centerradius manages the width of the entire tool
• handlerad can adjust the width of the top bar and the handles
• openerdepth is the height of the center part of the tool that opens the clay. Increase this if you are working with larger quantities of clay.
• bottomdepth is the distance between the bottom of the handles and the opener; this will be the thickness of the bottom of your pot.

The recommended parameters to change are starred.

Printing

Depending on the dimensions of the handles and opener and orientation of your model, you may need support when printing. I recommend printing with 20%- 30% infill and increasing shell thickness for durability.

License

This project is licensed with a CC Attribution-Noncommercial license. You can absolutely sell any ceramic creation that you make with this tool. Please do not print and sell this model itself. If you do share it, please attribute it properly.