Construction Calendar

[pfrank]

I've been on this forum for a while and have been trying to piece together a calendar of the various phases of a Casa -- slab, curing, stand, hearth, curing, dome, curing, fire curing. Does such a calendar exist on here? I haven't found it yet. Thanks.

[SableSprings]

Re: Construction Calendar

There's a thread in the "Pizza Oven Design..., Modular Refractory..." section named Installation that I linked below...in it (reply #2), I gave a timetable for a Casa 90 build in 2011 from dirt to dome. Hope that helps.

http://www.fornobravo.com/forum/f7/i...ime-18165.html

[pfrank]

Re: Construction Calendar

Thanks, but, really? 5 days from dirt to dome AND lighting your first fire?

Everything else I've read suggests a week for the slab to cure, a week for the hearth to cure, a week for the finished dome to cure and 5 days of curing fires -- basically a month of wait time that you bypassed. Has your oven held up?

[SableSprings]

Re: Construction Calendar

Thanks, but, really? 5 days from dirt to dome AND lighting your first fire?

Everything else I've read suggests a week for the slab to cure, a week for the hearth to cure, a week for the finished dome to cure and 5 days of curing fires -- basically a month of wait time that you bypassed. Has your oven held up?

Yes, guilty as charged - we cut the time down much below recommendations. Frankly, it was kind of interesting to see how quickly we could put this oven together. We had plenty of rebar in the slab pour with rock fill in the void beneath and we were trying to get the oven up in a limited amount of time. Because our time was very limited, I wanted to start the drying fires as soon as possible. So we popped off the slab forms, after the concrete had hardened for a few days, set the prefab sections of the hearth and dome on the insulation board on the green slab, mortared the dome seams and put on the insulation blankets. After we put on a layer of base stucco mix over the blankets, we started drying and initial very slow & low curing fires. My friend went back up to the lake later and went through six days of curing fires and finished applying a colored stucco coat.

We felt that our poured slab had set enough to hold the weight of the prefab oven so we really weren't worried there. Since the oven was made of prefab sections, we did not feel there was any need to let it dry out before we started the curing fires. The oven is covered with tarps over the winters, but has been working great and has been used pretty well from May to September every year since it was built. I included some bread pics, a lasagne, and a bleu cheese souffle that we baked early in September 2014 as proof of the puddin'. (I did make one mistake in the initial post above-now corrected...we put this oven together in early 2011 not 2012 - so it's been a working oven for four years now.)