Dome oven with hood instead of tunnel

[luigiman]

I have finally started to plan my own oven build after years of helping on other builds and using other people's ovens. Don't know what took so long.

My plan is to buy a cast dome kit (link below) and source my own insulation as I am a bit particular. I have access to a forklift so I want to fabricate a steel stand for the oven that can be moved.

A friend and I built an oven a few years ago where we substituted the tunnel with a stainless steel hood, surprisingly cost effective to have a local company fabricate. With no tunnel, you can have a door on lift off hinges with a quarter turn latch, and access to the oven floor is much better. We made removable side pieces that hung down from the hood on either side of the door to create the tunnel for when we wanted to reduce heat loss. I chose the kit linked below because the tunnel is cast as a separate piece, so I will simply not use it.

I can find no other posts by anyone who has done this, has anyone else seen a build like this, and can give me tips from their experience?

[wotavidone]

I built a dome with no outer arch and put a hood in front of it.
Worked fine on those rare days when there was no wind. The other 340 days of the year were driving me nuts..
First I stacked loose bricks either side with a piece of steel angle across the front to exclude the wind.
https://community.fornobravo.com/for...317#post191317

Then I finally replaced that with a proper mortared arch. Life got a whole lot less smokey.
https://community.fornobravo.com/for...493#post204493

If you are building inside your garage/man cave/enclosed entertainment area. the stainless steel hood will look great and work fine.
If you are outside and have side "curtains you can add to your hood, that'll work too.

[luigiman]

Hi wotavidone,

I checked out your build - very nice. On the oven I built with my friend we put the front just under a small awning, actually a ramp to the second floor, and built side panels to block the wind, so it burns fine. With no tunnel, the inside of the oven is so much more accessible, and we made the swing door which made it much easier for the ladies to pop their dishes in and out.

I notice your build was on a steel stand, like I am planning. What's your take on a concrete pad on top of the stand? I am hoping to avoid it because of weight concerns, and I am hoping to just make a sturdy enough stand, put some fairly heavy sheet on top, and then lay the board insulation right over that and the cast floor and dome on that. How has your oven held up? Any cracks or shifting because the base was not rigid enough? What did you do between the stand and the oven floor?

Cheers, Louis

[wotavidone]

That would be fine, in my opinion. Here in Oz we can get a fibre reinforced cement flooring sheet, it's about 1 inch thick and is used over timber joists as flooring for second floor bathrooms etc.
You wouldn't lay it just on the perimeter frame of your stand, you'd want two or three intermediate supports.
It would produce a lovely flat surface for the rest of the work.

I didn't use it because I would have had to buy a whole sheet and only use half of it, so I made lightweight concrete using volcanic rock (scoria) as the large aggregate to impart some insulating properties to the slab.

I was trying to get away from using something like cal/sil board, which wasn't cheap to buy plus freight was a killer.
(A lot of people asked why don't you just pop down to the city and get the right stuff?? Because it was a 300 mile round trip costing a day off work to get there when the shop was open and about $80 in fuel on top of the cost of the board, so local alternatives were the go.)