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I just fired my oven for the first time yesterday. What's different? I fired it from nothing to 700 degrees over 10 hours with no cracking.
The difference isn't the firing though - rather, coming from a construction background, I always wait a month before messing with concrete, so it had been curing for a month already naturally. This requires patience, but I really think it matters.
Second, I've got enormous thermal mass. The oven is a superior clay 36", which is pretty much the same as the forno bravos (I'd never heard of forno bravo before, happened upon this site by google accident). Its on a 5" slab, with 2" of insulating cement on that, then firebrick on that. The oven is in a concrete "box" that's around 4' x 5' by 4' high, with the concrete in turn veneered with stone. The space between the walls and the oven (which is covered with 2" of refractory cement) is loose vermiculite fill.
I think the combination of the long curing time and huge mass means that less uneven stress is put on the oven. We'll see how this works out in practice.
The difference isn't the firing though - rather, coming from a construction background, I always wait a month before messing with concrete, so it had been curing for a month already naturally. This requires patience, but I really think it matters.
Second, I've got enormous thermal mass. The oven is a superior clay 36", which is pretty much the same as the forno bravos (I'd never heard of forno bravo before, happened upon this site by google accident). Its on a 5" slab, with 2" of insulating cement on that, then firebrick on that. The oven is in a concrete "box" that's around 4' x 5' by 4' high, with the concrete in turn veneered with stone. The space between the walls and the oven (which is covered with 2" of refractory cement) is loose vermiculite fill.
I think the combination of the long curing time and huge mass means that less uneven stress is put on the oven. We'll see how this works out in practice.
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