Post by allotmenteer on Jul 2, 2016 5:43:50 GMT
I’m another one who has been planning for several years I have finally started my pizza oven build.
Like many others, I’ve found this forum a fantastic source of information and wouldn’t have had a clue where to start without it (I have no real building experience) I have taken photos of my build but particularly some of the bits I haven’t fully understood from the previous builds I’ve followed.
Thanks to all of you who manage and have contributed to the forum
This is my pile of 64 storage heater bricks from various sources (found another 6 that had escaped into the garden so really 70 to start with plus the flat ones – 36 of these) I recon this should be enough but not sure how much wastage I will have.
Thought this might be a useful guide for anyone else using these bricks – will give a count at the end of how many are left or I had to scrounge from elsewhere. Total spend on these so far is 99p on Ebay!
The oven will be 36” in diameter with a 16” x 11” opening.
I took about 6 months to decide exactly where it will go but have now made a start.
I made a standard rebar strengthened 4” slab to put the base on with some deeper footings under the blocks. I decided to have a 6” overhand to reduce the size of this and hopefully make it look a bit neater.
I had looked at the many builds and had initially decided on a corner layout with the front of the oven on the diagonal but eventually felt this would be difficult to access underneath with the relatively small entrance (I also had a bit of a nagging doubt about crawling into a space with around a tonne of material supported by my very amateur bricklaying ;-) ) so I decided to go for this layout .
The plan is to store wood in the front and ‘stuff’ around the back. This has proved very useful during the build so far at least – don’t have to keep carrying the tools back and forth.
I painted the inside as felt it would be easier before it is closed in. Should have applied this to the sides too as it was a real effort to get in after the top was in place.
I let the blocks firm up and then planned putting the (very heavy) slabs in place. I had considered trying to cast a solid slab but not for very long when I thought about leaks of concrete or a collapsed floor and decided slabs were the way to go.
Had to cut one in half to give a 5 x 6 plinth (actually a bit smaller as the slabs are metric).
The top of the blocks was fairly level as had used the lintels and bricks to finish this off but wasn’t sure I would be able to maintain this with a small amount of mortar as they went down so made some spacer rings up using my recently built 3D printer (winter project!), glued them in place and marked the points the slabs should meet at on them. It worked reasonably well as an amateur solution to replace some lacking skill and experience of doing this sort of thing.
I had also decided to incorporate a hole and duct pipe to allow me to install thermocouples at a later date so hired a diamond core drill to cut holes in the slab and wall.
I used a flush pipe as it has a long radius curve with no edges to stop the wire feeding through.
This did make installing the last slab tricky as it had to be dropped down onto the pipe. With hindsight it would have been much easier to use a 90 degree bend and 2 straight lengths installed to fit afterwards. The pipe is plenty big enough for the wires to get through without snagging on the edges.
Possibly the first WFO with an overflow pipe!
I used the same idea of the spacers to keep the thermolite blocks level. Quite a lot of these to lay and had to cut some thin pieces to fill in but it came out OK.
Finally got to start the oven proper now with the base.
I used the flat bricks (about 50 mm thick) then laid 6” x 6” quarry tiles on top. Spent a while looking for reclaimed ones but new were finally cheaper and less damaged so bought these (most expensive purchase so far!)
I had read in one of the builds a comment to make sure to get the floor as smooth as possible to avoid tools snagging. The tiles weren’t all that straight and it was difficult to get ones with complete edges even though they were new (the guy at the yard wasn’t too happy at me sorting through the whole pallet).
Some steps were unavoidable as the tiles weren’t dead flat and so hand sanded these down with a very fine grit to take off the last steps.
I made up my template and used this to mark up the tiles and cut them out. Fixed them with a bed of weak mortar and installed my first thermocouple into a joint about a third of the way in (guessed this is where I might eventually be cooking).
Glad of reading the comment to make the template in 3 pieces as it would only have come out as the first fire otherwise
I sorted out a version of the IT and got started with the first layer – cut these so that I had about an inch clear above the tiles before the first course of angled bricks.
I had bought a brick cutter from the forum buy and sell and now had to work out how to cut the bricks to get those nice straight joins as I went up the dome.
It took me to the 4th course to get it right as couldn’t see exactly what was indicated on the FB site (realise everyone else seems to have got it much more quickly). Also, I found that any short cuts I though I could take to save some cutting usually resulted in scrap bricks and more cutting in the long run.
I made up 2 fairly simple and cheap jigs to allow me to cut the whole bricks into quarters or sixths.
I then cut the 2 6 degree (in my case) faces to give the curve in the vertical plane using the tilting base on the saw (pie section cuts).
I then made the compound cuts to allow the joins to meet up without a ‘’V’ of mortar between them.
As I say, by the 4th layer I had cracked this but laying the bricks in an increasingly horizontal angle was starting to make it more and more difficult to hold the gaps. I ended up aiming to match the top of the last layer with the bottom of the next and set the angle with the IT and ‘let the mortar be my friend’ for the gaps!
The part I had spent a lot of time trying to get my head around was the arch transition and, after a lot of poor sketches which didn’t really help, decided to just go for it.
I had 12 of the light coloured ‘proper’ firebricks so decided to use these for the arch and upper layers as they are a lot less dense than the standard fire bricks and much easier to cut cleanly.
I built the side supports to fit in with the main dome and then made my form to support the arch.
I saw a guy on the FB forum that was using polystyrene blocks to get the shape right before cutting the bricks and doing this saved me a lot of waste – much easier with an old breadknife and a few attempts than cutting bricks.
(You can see I had to resort to building a ‘man shelter’ as don’t have a gazebo and was fed up o having rain running down my neck)
Final result was OK – both sides were fairly tidy but would have been nice if they had been the same! As many of you have said before however the pizza should still taste the same.
I ended up with 2 ‘eyebrows’ on the inside and thought long and hard about trying to cut them off with the grinder and decided it was really take it down and start again or live with it and went for the latter.
As I went onwards and upwards I started using small garden canes cut to fit each brick to support them until I had got all the way round and then removed them as I went round to do the pointing up / cleaning excess mortar off with a sponge. I found it was useful to have thicker mortar on the bottom to hold the brick and a bit thinner between then to allow them to butt up against each other fairly closely. Also got the hang of mixing a reasonable amount of mortar for each chain too – about 5L I guess.
