Hi and thanks

[s_seager]

Hi all, just wanted to post a couple of pictures of my first ever oven, built using some information found within these forums and elsewhere.

It's a first attempt, so I welcome constructive criticism. I decided to build one shortly after coming back from a holiday in Italy - my wife and son love pizza!

Cheers all

[UtahBeehiver]

S,

Nice use of mix medium. It is difficult to comment on the construction of the oven from the finished product so maybe you can enlighten us on several aspects of the oven we cannot see.

How did you insulate the oven (walls and under floor, what materials did you use, how much etc?

The floor appear to butt up right against the wood timbers, is there an isolation break between the oven floor and walls and the timbers and floor? These ovens can reach up to 1000 F and the bricks will transmit the heat to the timbers and the base.

Are you planning on cooking other than pizzas, if so how are you going to build the door? From the pics I do not see a reveal for the door to seal against and isolate the chimney vent from drawing out your precious oven heat for use after the pizzas are cooked.

In any event nice looking oven, does not appear that the curing has started yet so take your time and be patient. There are several curing schedules threads on the site.

[s_seager]

Hi, thanks for your reply.

The oven floor is suspended on concrete lintels, on top of which lie 4 inch thermalite blocks, two inches of sand and fire clay mix, and then the fire bricks forming the floor. The floor does indeed come close to the timbers, but there is a small gap all the way round, approx 1/4 inch which is filled with kiln dried sand.

The walls are just two skins of brick, fire brick internally and clay brick externally, bonded with a refractory mortar mix using lime and fireclay, portland cement and sand. There is a small gap between the skins to allow for movement.

As far as cooking goes, it will largely be pizzas. I have some solid oak left which I plan to plane down to the exact dimensions of the opening arch, which once soaked in water I will use as a plug to retain heat, should I want to cook anything other than pizza. Plugging up the archway will also seal the chimney.

Thanks again for your comments. I will have a read up on curing as you suggest.

[s_seager]

A few more pictures to clarify the base construction.

[s_seager]

[UtahBeehiver]

S,

Makes sense now, thermalite has similar thermo properties of CaSi insulating board 0.15 Watts/mK at 200C. So good there. This isolates the floor from being a heat sink. You have a ton of thermal mass with the two layers of brick. The only drawback is the small air gap will not help much in heat dissipating off the dome and the oven will cool relatively quickly (but for pizzas with a live fire your good). Next oven, insulate the dome area with several inches CaSi, 4-5" of V-Crete, of some other type of insulation and you could easily get 4-5 days worth of cooking heat out of one firing.

[s_seager]

Thanks for the tips. I've left enough space that I could still at this point vermicrete ( or similar) and render the whole structure, to further improve the cooking time, but to be honest, I think pizza is likely to be the order of the day, and probably no more than 5 - 10 firings a year, so I've compromised slightly and gone for aesthetics over sheer functionality!