Fio's Oven Curing Confessional

[Fio]

Originally Posted by DrakeRemoray

Where do you get furnace cement? I have not seen it at HD...

Furnace Cement is one of many things that is not stocked by Home Depot. I went to a real-live Ace Hardware store to get it. They sold me my ceramic space heater, furnace cement, and oven floor thermometer. All on a blistering hot day in July. HD had none of these items.

I am tempted to vent my spleen about how Big Boxes like Home Depot and Wal Mart are ruining America, but for now I will zip it.

Nothing like the pleasure of going to a REAL hardware store.

[FlGator]

If one use only furnace cement for all the dome, do you still need to build up to heat? Besides price, why not only use furnace cement for the dome?

[Marcel]

Originally Posted by FlGator

If one use only furnace cement for all the dome, do you still need to build up to heat?


(M) Yes! Furnace cement gains strength from a "heat cure"


Besides price, why not only use furnace cement for the dome?

(M) You'd be buying so many small containers of furnace cement that you'd go crazy disposing of all the empties. I have not seen furnace cement available in bulk.

(M) Also, regular portland based refractory mortar will gain some strength even after a few hours; the furnace cement may not be able to support your bricks before it is fired and you would start to losen your bricks as you built up your courses.

(M) If it were a viable alternative you'd see chimneys that used furnace cement between the bricks rather than mortar.

Ciao,

Marcel

[TomB]

Here are pictures of my new oven. I cant wait to build a fire in it. oops How do you reduce the size of a jpeg for posting?

[dmun]

Most picture editing programs have an "edit image" pull down menu, and one of the choices will be edit image size. If you make your picture 500 pixels wide, you should be good to go.

I use and recommend "IrfanView" to edit pictures. It's easy and free. Any picture editing utility, including the one that came with you camera, should do the same thing.

[TomB]

My 7day old oven. Can I start a fire yet? It has been over 100 degrees every day since

[james]

Tom,

Great looking spot, and great looking oven. Congratulation. Now, with just a little more patience, you are going to be off and cooking.

You should cure your oven over about 7 days, bring it up to heat (and cooling off each time) slowly. It's worth going slow.

Here is a link to the instructions:

http://fornobravo.com/forum/showthread.php?t=767

You're close!
James

[TomB]

Thanks for the moral support. Now that it is done it is hard to wait however I will follow your advice. Im excited now.

[james]

You won't be ready for pizza, but at least you can roast a chicken and a pan of vegetables after 3-4 days of fires. You can put that retained heat to good use, and not worry about getting the oven too hot. The chicken will be great.

The good news is that you will be amazed at how well she cooks. Now that's something to look forward to.

James

[jayjay]

I envy you guys in the states with all this heat stop and refrax and
other stuff we could only dream of here. One thing we have here
is cheap labor and lots of heat and occassional rain.
Our oven cost about $200 or less to build. This is the first oven
I or the brick mason ever build, other than a few clay ones to experiment
with. They fell appart so fast we decided not to go that route. The old
man charged me about $4.50 a day or so, give or take, the peso to dollar rate has changed so much over the last few weeks. But the old man worked
steady and seemed to know what he was doing.
I am wondering the best place to get an infrared therometer. I am going
to be in Houston over the Christmas Holidays. What is a decent price
to pay for one. Would they really be worth the investment? I do plan to use this oven a fair amount.
Do the walls of the oven, the walls outside the clay, the cement walls, on the outside of the oven you guys built, get warm. My oven walls on the outside
only seem to get luke warm. Also, except a few hairline cracks near the chimney in the front of the oven, there are no cracks and no leaking of heat that I can tell. When we have a flame, we have smoke coming out of the
door of the oven, when we have coals burning the chimney seems to be
drawing fine. We should have made the oven's chimney bigger, but we were
starting to run our of bricks. We used the last whole brick on the chimney.
What size chimney should a 3 x 4 foot oven have.
JJ
Philippines