A ball mill crushes and grinds the materials used in ceramics into small particles. Made with hard surfaces that disintegrate these materials without wearing out the equipment in the process, you will find two types of ball mills. The wet ball mill obviously grinds the wet material, while the dry ball mill grinds the dry. Gauges fitted into the ball mills serve to ensure quality requirements are met.
A filter press dries the sludge of these materials after the wet crushing. Common filter presses used in the manufacturing process include the press and plate filter presses. These filter use pressure to dry out the water in these materials. The plates inside the presses work like sieves to protect the machinery from intrusion by these hard foreign particles.
With a name that sounds more like the name of a hockey team than a piece of industrial machinery, blungers help in the preparation of slip (clay and water), a type of material used in ceramic preparation. Most parts of the machine are made of steel to prevent excessive wearing. Another reason you'll find steel in a blunger is because it is easy to replace. The design of a blunger keeps it from accepting slip at a specific weight to avoid collapse of the machine.
Used in the final coat and firing process, glazing places a glass-like coating around a piece of hardened ceramic to give it that shiny or decorative appeal. For utility applications, the glazing serves as a final coat for the insulator found atop most utility poles with a hot electrical wire suspended through it. Before coating and firing the ceramic piece with glaze, the glaze must be stirred and mixed thoroughly. Hobbyists do this work by hand, but in the manufacturing setting, this becomes counter-productive. A glaze stirrer reduces the solubility of the glaze to avoid emissions of poisonous compounds as well as effectively stirring the solution to one that is easily applied to the final ceramic piece.