Making a wood burning oven

Our goal:

    To make first rate pizza, bread and roasted mammal components

Our solution:

   Build a 36" diameter wood burning oven

Why wood burning?

1) We live in a forest

2) Wood smoke tastes good

3) We had a boat load of bricks from a chimney we demolished when we remodeled the house

Our story...

So I made a brick box like this

Add Support structures 

6 inch I-beam I had left over from a job                                 Temporary supports for concrete pour

This concrete slab that holds the oven up is going to get hot and that will make the slab expand. I don't want it to push on the walls of the brick box and possibly break the box so.....

First we cover the top of the bricks with 2 layers of 6 mil plastic to start making a slip joint

Then add some spacers made from foam insulation to keep 

the concrete 3/4 inch from the sides of the brick box

The foam will need to come out later so I tied mason line to some 1/4 inch 

dowels so that I could pull it out after the concrete has set

* I'll let you know how this works

Update ( The foam spacers came out perfectly naturally...hehe)

And covered them with duct tape to keep the concrete out

Next I added 1/2 inch Hardie board to fill the space between 

the I-beam and the blue spacers. 

                                                       

Next comes a mat of rebar 

And a form for the concrete

                                                    

Making a wood burning oven "The Pour"

We are getting ready to pour the hearth slab. First we did a few things to get ready:

Blocked up the mortar tray so we wouldn't have to bend over so much

Blocked up in front of the mixer so we had a level place to stand at a good height for pouring concrete out of the bags

Duct taped the seams so we would have fewer drips and puddles

Made a couple of screeds to rough level the concrete

This product wants about 2 1/3 gal water per bag so we marked a bucket accordingly

Mix Mix Mix

Pour Pour Pour

And three hours later, there you go

Say good night Gracie, we'll see you in a couple of weeks

And now for something completely different...

Tune in next time for Making a wood burning oven "The Welding"

Making a wood burning oven "The welding"

First I got one of these. A 37 inch tank head. Not as expensive as you might think

Sheared som parts like this

Tacked them to make an entry like this

Then marked the entry and fit it to the dome

Next I marked the dome and cut the doorway

Welded it up

Added lips for the inner and outer doors (more on those later)

Tacked the chimney together and I was pretty much done for the day

Next time we lay the hearth

Making a wood burning oven "Insulating the Hearth"

This step is pretty simple

Use a mixture of 5 parts perlite, 1 part portland cement, 1 part water. I used a 5 gallon bucket to measure and found that using 2 1/2 buckets perlite, 1/2 bucket each water and cement was about right. Much more and it is hard to mix the stuff on the bottom. So here we go:

2  1/2 buckets perlite

1/2 bucket cement. Mix dry ingredients

1/2 bucket water and mix until it will clump when squeezed

Shovel it in and screed it off

Pack lightly with your trowel fill low spots screed pack etc...

Making a wood burning oven "The hearth"

We are laying a hearth of fire brick to actually build the fire on and serve as the main cooking surface.
This was surprisingly easy. I used a mixture of masonry sand, fire clay and water to bed the bricks. The mixture is equal parts sand and clay. I used a cement mixer to mix the dry ingredients, but a stick would have worked fine too. Next I mixed 3 parts sand/clay with 1 part water in a 5 gal bucket. I found using hands to mix the water in was the easiest way to do this. Just like kneading bread dough. This stuff doesn't set up like mortar so just mix it and put a lid on the bucket. Add water or clay  at any time to adjust the consistency. Here's how it went:

I laid the central portion and then did the edges that needed to have cut bricks

Here is said central area with one side complete

The method to lay the brick is pretty straight forward

Load the brick with clay

 

Set it in place and make sure it sits proud of the rest of the brick field

Tap it into place with a dead blow hammer and check level

Note: rubber hammers suck, use a dead blow

Use a precision radius marking tool and cut the bricks to fit the edges

I'm letting the outer masonry shell sit on the fire brick so there's no need for great accuracy here

And about 4 hours later, there ya go