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.

Building the Cooking Chamber, Part 1

Although the rain threatened in the morning, it held off enough today to begin the cooking chamber.  This is a big day. We put down the firebrick that will be the cooking surface of our oven, built up the walls, and then built the wooden form for us to pour the high termperature concrete (that'll hold it all in place).

Tomorrow we'll fill the forms with concrete, and then on Monday start building the arches of the cooking chamber.  Pretty darn cool.

Here's some photos of the work.  First, there was the laying of firebrick on a bed of Hawthorne Fireclay 35 mesh.

Then we have to get it all level and build up the walls.

Then we built an internal brace to keep the firebrick in place while the high temperature concrete is poured. In the picture below you can see the 2x4 brace across the middle of the cooking surface.

Then we stacked some more bricks along our wall (these will be the base of our arches).

Then we finish the outside forms.

Tomorrow we'll pour the concrete in the space between the firebrick wall and the outside form.

Unloading a ton of bricks

Firebricks are interesting little things.  Each of these little beauties are pretty dense and heavy (about 7 pounds).  The ones we bought are good to about 2200 degrees.  They also cost a heckuva lot more than the died concrete you get at the local hardware emporium.  According to the very credible website, Wikipedia, firebrick has Aluminium oxide, which helps it withstand high heat.

Today, we took delivery of our oven's firebrick.  By taking delivery, I really mean that we got our hands on a rockin' big truck and hauled it over ourselves.  The turn-out was great, and a dozen volunteers moved the brick up to the worksite in about thirty minutes.  We had planned on having some pizza, but we were done so early people just went home.  So, there will be pizza another time.

Here we are unloading the truck in all our merriment: