All the plastic clay was produced by filter-pressing the liquid slip, and the throughput from each filterpress was one cycle approximately every five hours, much longer than normal. All the presses were stripped down and numerous filtration problems discovered such as: blocked drain holes from the plates, encrusted filtercloths, backing cloths torn and damaged, with dry clay preventing the run-off of the water. The presses were serviced and cleaned, new cloths fitted and coupled with an increase in the density of the liquid slip, each cycle was reduced to around 2.5 hours.

This enabled a substantial increase of clay to the extruding machines, which in turn presented more material to the manufacturing units.