Originally posted by stonecutter
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Bearing in mind that neither myself nor my brother have ever done any brickwork or stonesetting before this project, a lot of you experienced folks will probably get a good chuckle out of our non-professional approach to rebuilding of the oven.
Please bear in mind also that BEFORE I ever found this forum we were a good distance down the rebuild-road so if there are suggestions to be made, those suggestions can only be implemented on the second oven to be built on my own property next year. Please though, add any input that you feel will help us improve the design and or operation for the next one.
As a base, an 18" deep pit was dug 6'x7' and filled with limestone screenings from the local quarry. We rented a gas powered tamper and tamped each level in 2" increments from the bottom to the top then poured a 2 1/2" cap of pre-mix a little at a time and set/leveled the first course of stone in the still wet pour.
The four yellow pins were placed as the target size for the footprint of the new oven. Our plans were to include the "jetting" of meramec sand into the hollow cavity under the cooksurface which is why there is a drain pipe covered in screen wire placed in the bottom center. The thought was that excess water would slowly drain out the bottom of the firmly packed (jetted) sand.
What we were intending was to create a huge heat sink under the cook surface to absorb and hold a lot of heat for an extremely long cooking time.
In retrospect, I can see mistakes we made in the rock selection process as the base was going up....but hind sight is always 20-20 isn't it...
We tried to select stones with at least one nice squarely cut corner for the corners and tried to maintain a semblance of level while going up with the sides.
This is a wonderful example showing the dozens of chisel marks left in the stone so long ago. You can almost imagine the gaunt shape of an 1880's hard working farmer bent over with hammer and chisel in hand... Worn out bib overalls, holes in his shoes and calloused hands tapping away little by little.
This was one big mistake we made... This excellent example of the family Patriarch's handiwork should have been placed in the build to highlight these marks made so long ago instead of buried along with more mundane rocks in the ovens base.
Is four the maximum number of pictures per post ? I have plenty of pictures yet to put up, and if that is the case, this may stretch out for a while ....
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