The outside oven

November 13, 2010 – 9:41 pm

For those who have come to know me, I enjoy eating (as evidenced by the weight gain in the last few years!)

In a previous post, I showed a cobb oven made from mud in the land down under.

Now, I am going at an oven on my own property. It was planned for whilst building the Tuscan camo’d bunker. I set up the base and pured the concrete floor over a year ago. I poured the insulating vermiculite layer earlier this year. This week, I scored some almost 100 year old fire brick from work (tested out as non-hazardous), borrowed a harbor freight tile saw from a friend and started in earnest!

The oven diameter is about 41.5 inches and will have a finished interior height of about 19.5 inches. As one of the readers asked, are you going to cook a whole dear in it? The answer is – maybe

The goal is to get this thing completed by this Thursday/Friday so that I can get a fire in it and have a pizza on Thanksgiving with the family – we will see. I ran into a few problems due to breakage of tools and my anal retentive engineering behavior. Top it of with my slave/child labor rebelling (at first) and you get a union style work stoppage. That came to a quick halt!

As for the mortar recipe – 1 part fire clay, 1 part lime, 1 part Portland cement and 3 parts silica sand (fine/30 grit). Thoroughly mix and the stuff is sticky!

I have finished the first two rows (a soldier course and the first chain.) The soldier course has a 20 degree angle put in it. Each chain will be subsequently steeper. The trick right now is for me to get the opening completed before I get too much higher on the dome.

Keep your eyes peeled and be sure to wear your personal protective equipment – I blew through 4 sets of gloves and still have a few lime burns.