Jake's In Mass (Started July 3, 2011)

[Lburou]

You are doing very well in terms of the bond between the chains, wish my oven had that much overlap

With regard to the entry shape, do what you are comfortable with.

[jatsrt]

Quick update, took a couple of weeks off. Had a car accident before last weekend and rested after that. This weekend was my nephew's birthday party and football. I'm hoping that I can get to the opening and a good portion of the dome this weekend and get this thing finished up soon.

[jatsrt]

Busy couple of weeks, lots of pictures coming soon.

[jatsrt]

OK, quick update and some photos. When the project is done I'll try to post a lot more photos than is in here.

So, some refresher, I am going for "good" not "perfect". My goal is to build a really nice and well working oven with minimal skill(that's me), a good price(all locally sourced) and spare time(really one day a weekend at most).

With that being said, I was able to complete an opening, build up a platform for a flu liner, and have my courses almost all the way up to full complete circles.

Take a look, let me know what you think, I'm open for comments as always :-)

[PizzaIdiot]

It's looking good Jake.
I can even see the fine job of staggering the joints you did!
Can't wait to see more pix.
I following the same philosophy, but it's more like every other weekend.

- jeff

[jatsrt]

Hi all,
It's been a while. I've attached a couple of photos to let you know where I am.

Overall very good progress. As you can see from the photos a few major milesontes.

1. The oven is complete! Finished off the dome with a simple foam form.
2. This is the first fire to start drying it out.
3. It's been framed and starting to look more "complete"

So some detail. We made it up pretty far using the indispensible tool. However, due to the encroaching winter(already hit with a 1' snow storm) We decided we needed to speed things up to get this sucker done. So we made sure we had enough material, created a foam forma and finished the dome in a day.
Over the next week I mentally planned out the framing. Started that this past friday and by end of day yesterday you can see in the picture what I have.

Some things you will notice. First the oven is not insulated yet, though I started the housing. Pretty much I am trying to weather proof it the best I can. I need to do a few more burns to dry out the oven completely before I can insulate it. So I am 1/2 doing one while still working on the other. I made sure we left enough room to work with to get the insulation done.

Second, while not pretty my opening and flue worked like a charm. After a full day of burn in there was no darkening of the arch past the flue. There is a ton of moisture in my oven right now, it is going to take a long time to dry this thing out. However a low and slow 300ish temp all day was pretty easy to do. At the end of it the top of my some was dry, not cracked, and warm. All good things.

Next steps?
I am going to get as much as I can get done before the weather turns too much for the worse. So in rough order until the weather does not allow it.

1. Facade my arch, either brick, stone or tile. Not too sure yet but I need to clean up the look of the arch with a facade.
2. Insulate the oven. I have a nice local supplier of ceramic blanket for a good price.
3. Finnish the cement board and make it weather tight.
4. Veneer the bottom part with either thin brick or thin stone, not too sure yet.
5. Finnish the top, exact details to be determined later

Thanks all and I promise at some point I will do a complete photo gallery with the missing steps and better journaling.

-Jake