For consistency with Tinker's Construct, it would be cool to have a clay version of the Bucket Cast.

Tinkers Construct does not do clay casts for non-tool parts (see ingots, nuggets, gears, etc), so it would hardly be consistency.

I can see it being useful for gating the bucket without requiring gold, though without a mod like Ceramics that is impossible as iron needs lava to melt.

You could lower the smelting temoeratur via modtweaker so you would be able to smelt ist with coal instead of lava, because i relly like the idea of getting the bucket without requiring gold.

Added in 0.3.0