Have you ever been frustrated trying to cut nice neat thin slices of canes to
use in your polymer clay projects? I know I have and I've wasted a lot of cane
that I spent a lot of time building and so a few months ago I bought for
myself a Lucy clay mini slicer and so today I'm going to show you ways I've
figured out to use it to make my polymer clay canes slicing much neater and more
accurate. So here's the mini slicer from Lucy clay. Lucy is a gal over in, I
believe the Czech Republic who likes to play with polymer clay and her father
was an engineering sort and he helped design some wonderful tools that she has
put on the market. I also own her Czechstruder which I owe you guys a video of
because it's a fantastic tool as well, they're all well engineered, well
designed and I'm pretty happy with this small slicer, it was half the price of
the big one, it was about $100 and the big one's around $200. So I'm going to show
you how I figured out how to use it. Now if you got yours and are looking on in
dismay at it all in pieces in the box you can go to my video that shows you how to
assemble it because there is some assembly. I know some of you don't like
doing that sort of thing, I kind of enjoy it. So here's one very important thing
that comes with your Lucy clay slicer and it's just a big ol' magnet and this
is a safety device, it goes right here over the blade so that it will not lift
up easily, there's even a little clue here show showing you the hole which
corresponds to, it's actually not a hole, it's a magnet that your blade goes up on
which is another safety device so they kind of thought this through. So whenever
I'm not using the slicer this magnet is right on here. I don't have small
children around but anything can happen. So I'll just set this aside now once I'm
ready to slice the other thing, unfortunately that I found was necessary
is to remove this back support, it is just in the way. I'll show you what I
mean, here I have some cane this is a piece of a butterfly cane you can see it
in use here on this business card holder that I made with all different slices of
cane I'll tell you more about that in a minute,
and this cane is short enough that if I wanted to slice it I would not need to
pull this out but if I get much longer than this, it's like, if I want to slice
this cane it's just in the way. So I've found it kind of has just become my
practice when I'm ready to start slicing this comes off. These two brackets
basically keep the whole thing square so as long as you don't try to wrack it
after you take this off you'll be fine, and it just gives you a little bit more
room in the back. It comes with this tray and the sticker that's on it has inches
and then also centimeters and millimeters even though I'm an American
and I've been using the American or Imperial measurements all my life since
I got into jewelry making and polymer clay I just think the metric system
makes so much more sense when you're measuring little bitty things like beads
and slices of clay and so I like to use millimeter measurements. So I'm going to
slide this in with the words mini slicer facing me rather than the code here so
that I've got millimeters right here.
So that slides in there and it's good to keep it for keeping it steady if you
have it out beyond the front of the tray,
and if you look carefully there what I've done is I've lined up my blade so
that it is right on one of those marks. Now watch here you can see you see that
move, there is a little bit of side-to-side slop in this in this tray,
so I've kind of figured out a technique for getting beyond that. I think if I had
it to do over again I might have gotten the bigger one which has a dial that you
can dial in a very fine adjustment for your slices, but I don't do a lot of
caning and my thought was that this is small and fits on my desk nicely and the
big one takes up a fair amount of space so I'll make do with this. So we've got
that lined up right on the 1, for now, so that's lined up so good I havethat
down, and now here's some cane I want to slice. This was sliced on the slicer so I
know this is a nice neat cut edge and I hate always wasting some at the
beginning or the end so this is kind of my workaround. I'm going to take my cane
I'm going to press it up against that blade, I'm also kind of lining it up with
this line, that's not so crucial but you mean, you don't want to go in this way
obviously. I want it pretty much perpendicular to the blade... a little bit
of light pressure and I'm actually just going to keep my fingers on there while
I lift up the blade, that should be lined up exactly on the one. Now what I'm
looking at over here are these lines and this edge and I can just scooch it so
here it was on this line which lines up with the one. I found that and I'm just
going to scooch it to the next one and what I'm doing with my left hand is I'm
pushing this, not so hard that I push the machine over, but just hard enough
that this tray is firmly against this whole edge over here, and then I can
kind of push in opposition to my left hand so my hands are pushing towards
each other as I cut, and I'm double checking, see that just moved, so I'm
double checking... and that is a paper-thin slice, that wasn't really what I intended
to do. Don't reach under the blade there's a magnet there holding it up
and it's kind of stiff anyways but I don't know how long that stiffness is
going to remain, I think it'll probably loosen up the more I use it. So now let's
advance that one whole mark right over here pushing the tray up against the
right side with my left hand, pushing just slightly this way with my right
hand, left hand pushes towards the right, right hand pushes towards the left, check
that mark... you just kind of have to keep double-checking, make sure that mark is
where you want it, and slice. Now that is a pretty thick slice but what's nice is
that you can get them very consistent so let's try again. I think something moved
because it's thicker than I was expecting it to be. Okay,
there we go that's a nice slice about 1/16 of an inch thick, but if you want
them thinner what I found to do, it's hard to line up with these
lines over here but, because you have no reference, so what I found to do is just
go right in the middle of two lines over here and the more you do the more you'll
be able to see and get that accurate and consistent, so about half of that
thickness, that's really the thickness I'm looking for, and I forgot to bring a tool
to pick that up with, that's a nice thickness. One thing I found when making
this, this was this size and it it spread a bit not a ton but it definitely spread
a bit like this. This one probably shows it most dramatically, here's this little
green piece and you can see how much these spread when I made them this
thickness but I'm certain if I made them half of that thickness, this thickness,
they wouldn't have spread as much. So you get twice as much out of your cane and
you have a bit more accuracy in the finished size that you want your pieces
to be. So that's how I figured out to use this tool to get nice thin slices.
Consistency is really really useful here and notice I'm leaving the blade
down so that if I accidentally like were to reach under and brush up against it
I'm not going to because it's down out of the way, but you should never reach
under there, just don't ever do it. Make it a habit, make it a practice that if
you need to get something on here then back the tray out, take it off completely,
put the blade down. And so I'm rather pleased with this.
I do in some ways in the interest of accuracy and ease I think the bigger one
would probably be better, but I'm not someone who does a lot of caning and if
you do a lot of caning and you do a lot of slicing of canes, you may not even
need a tool like this because really it is something you can do, you can get very
good and consistent at this sort of thing just with your regular blade with
a bit of practice. So if you do a lot of caning then maybe you don't need this
because you're getting in the practice, but if you're someone like me that kind
of dabbles and only does it on occasion then you might find a tool like this
really handy. And just to get back to this I had a lot of fun making this and
I'm going to do another Friday findings video sometime soon showing what I
learned about making a veneer like this. This is a business card case that I
bought on Amazon and then this is just a cover for it that I made. There's my
business card in there. I figured if I was gonna be handing out business cards
I had to have something on it that showed what I do. So in that video I will
show you some tips and tricks that I figured out for taking a whole bunch of
different canes, and these were all canes that I already had made that I had made
for whatever reason in the past and so I had all of these even the leaves and
such. So I hope you found that helpful if you bought the Lucy Clay mini slicer and
found it may be a little bit frustrating to use I hope that that might give you
some help. If you're interested in the supplies I used you can click on the
little eye or the tag on the upper right of the video or the link in the
description box below the video. Be sure to subscribe if you haven't already and
take a look at my Patreon page to see how you can get bonus tutorials every
month. Happy creating, bye bye.