Handbuilding is an umbrella term for forming techniques that shape clay by hand rather than on a spinning wheel, covering the pinch pot, coil building, slab building, extrusion, and press molding. It can produce forms a wheel cannot, including markedly asymmetrical, very large, or strictly geometric and architectural shapes, and needs no equipment beyond basic hand tools.
Nearly every handbuilding method eventually requires joining two separate pieces of clay together, whether that means stacking one coil on the next, sealing the two edges of a rolled slab, or attaching a pulled handle to a pinch-built cup. The standard method is scoring and slipping: roughening both surfaces that will meet with a fork or a serrated rib, then applying slip to one or both surfaces as an adhesive before pressing them firmly together. A join made without scoring and slip can look sound while the clay is still leather-hard, then crack apart during drying or firing as the two surfaces, never truly fused, shrink slightly differently from each other.
A small set of hand tools recurs across all three methods. A rib (wood, metal, or rubber) smooths and compresses a surface or refines a curve without the fingers leaving their own marks. A wooden paddle, tapped against a wall from the outside while a hand or anvil-shaped tool supports it from inside, compresses and shapes a form (particularly a coil-built one) and can imprint texture at the same time. Wire, needle, and rib tools trim excess clay, pierce trapped air pockets, and clean up a seam once it is joined. None of these are specific to one handbuilding method; the same small kit moves between a pinch pot, a coil-built vessel, and a slab-built form as needed.
The handbuilding methods suit different shapes and scales. A pinch pot is fastest for a single small vessel and needs no tools at all, but hand size and reach limit how large it can practically get. Coil building scales to much larger or more irregular forms than pinching, built up gradually enough that the lower courses can stiffen before more weight is added on top. Slab building is the natural choice for anything geometric, flat-sided, or architectural, since a rolled sheet cuts and joins the way flat material generally does. Extrusion is less a way to build a whole form and more a way to produce uniform coils, tiles, or handle stock quickly for use in the other methods. Press molding trades some of handbuilding's shape freedom for repeatability, taking the same detailed shape from a mold again and again. None of these are exclusive: a coil-built wall might rise from a slab base, or a thrown form might be finished with a handbuilt, pulled handle, and combining methods on a single piece is common practice rather than an exception.