A little more brick

It was a great Saturday morning. We had ten people out to help on the oven at various points in the day.  On task was the completion of the lower base of the oven's exterior.  We put down row after row of brick, and Mike suggested that we edge out some of our mortar to make the bricks pop and make our brick laying "sins" a little less noticeable.  We did that, and it looks pretty darn cool.

We mixed up the mortar in the wheelbarrow that a member found abandoned in the boulevard a few blocks East of the church.

Then we got some kiddos in on the action. (child labor laws do not apply to volunteer stuff, I think?)

Then before too long we had a wall.

The next step is to build the brick arch over where some firewood will be stored, and start building the entrance and chimney for the oven.

The Laying of Brick

This past Tuesday our brick arrived in the rain, all 1,500 of these little beauties.  Many thanks to Scott Olson at Olson Brick Sales and Tim Dougherty at Acme Brick for their help and support of this project. The bricks are beautiful and will give the oven the "old world" look that we were looking for.

We moved the bricks up to the worksite, and then the more skilled amongst us made all four corners level and square.

Then the newbies started laying the brick out from there.

 Before you knew it, we started to have actual rows of bricks and it started to look like a real brick oven.

 Not too shabby.  The hole that you see is where the wrought iron door to the ash chamber will go. The white clouds on the brick will also be power washed off when the oven is completed.

Sealing the chamber with high temperature concrete

It was all hands on deck today as we tackled the last of the big muscle jobs. We needed to mix a bunch of concrete to pour over the top of our cooking chamber.  This will help keep the chamber solid, and the high temperature concrete will also keep it insulated.

We had over a dozen people out this afternoon to help (not too shabby for the Friday of Memorial Day weekend).

We had expert supervision.

We had four wheelbarrows going back and forth.

Then we had a team filling a big bucket and pouring it over the top of the chamber.

After waiting a day to take the forms off, we finally had a look at the finished product...behold the cooking chamber. (NOTE: we still have to build our walls, chimney, roof, and the oven "entrance")

Building the Cooking Chamber, Part 4

In order to get the right air flow, the cooking chamber needs a dip. So tonight we worked on a smaller arch that will lead to our chimney in the front of our oven.


First we had to soak the splits and prepare the entrance:

Once the entrance was built we had to cut the angled brick that will support our new, smaller arch.

Then we laid the arch:

Building the Cooking Chamber, Part 3

Well today was pretty cool, and I think demonstrated why the building of an oven is not something that can easily be done by a book or written instruction manual.  It's a craft, and there are so many tiny steps and choices that it would take a long time to write down in any coherent structure.  So, instead, we get the teaching method that has been used for thousands of years: "Here, let me show you how to do it."

There's so much power in that. We live in a world where we are constantly told what to do, but the people doing the telling rarely show you how it's done.  It's the teacher living out the concepts that they are teaching, rather than just standing at the front of a classroom or on high.

With that, we had our fearless teacher, Mike, showing us how to do it....and we did it!  After a wooden half circle form was built, the crew began laying the arches for our beautiful and quite big cooking chamber.

Here you can see that two arches have been built, and the form has been pulled forward for the third arch as we work toward the front of the cooking chamber.  You have to get the arch just right, so there aren't wide gaps and it lines up with the arches behind it.

When each arch is done, then the inside needs to be cleaned with a wet sponge before the mortar dries.

Then you do it, again and again, until you are to the front of the cooking chamber.

And eventually the final scrub. This thing is solid. It is now apparent that if there is a tornado, I might be taking refuge in the brick oven.