Brick oven reconstructed to a steel one

[v12spirit]

Re: Brick oven reconstructed to a steel one

Yes she is. I took her in a ride as a tribute for her patience cleaning up the mess I made in the kitchen..
Mrs. Pepper Pot was a Japanese cartoon film that was popular in the eighties. The woman could occasionally shrink in size. Would be a great help to me, approved by the wife, being not beautiful, and rather small .
Glad to hear about ovens having pretty similar thermal mass to my plan. I intend to make it 5 on the dome and 3+ on the walls.
Wood was never free in Syria. I have to pay for it, and that's why I was seeking fuel effeciency by adjusting the thermal mass and adding steel. It is collected by farmers substituting their trees with other kinds that are more lucrative. and after the crisis it became 5 times more expensive, could even be10 times in the winter.

[v12spirit]

Re: Brick oven reconstructed to a steel one

Cladding is to start soon. I decided to provide the oven with an ash hole. Sounds like a pun.. I couldn't find another name for this thing really. It is supposed to replace the ash shovel. I hope it works fine.
Drilled a hole in the basalt slab, fitted a 2? scrap steel tube cut in angle to allow it to be hidden under the right leg of the entrance arch, then using a mold, clad it with cement to fix it in place. It is supposed to connect to another tube under the slab that drains into a metal bucket. My molding of cement is making me questioning how well I?m going to clad the oven. It is awkward.

[v12spirit]

Re: Brick oven reconstructed to a steel one

Eventually decided to use homebrew for cladding with the help of the recipe of Saovicente on the "Homebrew" thread. Slaked quick lime for a week+, let it dry out, then 3:1:1:1 crushed basalt, lime, cement, clay. Today about third the way far was achieved.

[v12spirit]

Re: Brick oven reconstructed to a steel one

Have been cladding, could make the mix stiff and clad as if the steel layer were a sand castle, but I needed the ramming thing not only for removing voids, but also to make the cladding fit tightly over the steel. Not willing to make an outer mold, I used the cardboard piece that I had used for designing the sidewalls after covering it with gorilla tape, tried to make it fit tightly over the individual blocks with the help of some bricks and pieces of a vegetable foam box. Still having the mix flow over the rims of the lower steel belt surrounding the blocks, but could overcome that by making the mix a bit stiffer and fixing the cardboard mold more tightly. In hope to make sorta cracking control, I Stuck an aluminum tape between every two blocks. The dome was split into 4 pieces separated by aluminum foil too. Gravity will hopefully recover any expansion driven disorder. Moreover, the big number of blocks (15) will make the blocks smaller hence stronger, and will distribute the expansion gaps between the blocks that will exist when the oven is hot to even smaller ones hopefully unnoticeable. The 14 steel blades between the blocks not only will control the expansions and contractions but will also make the heat of the oven radiate into the refractory hopefully minimizing the heat up time.
Being masonry ignorant, could only do 4 blocks per day, I have 3 left to do today.
Am embarassed at how the cladding looks, but it is really tight which concerns me more than how it looks.

[cobblerdave]

Re: Brick oven reconstructed to a steel one

G'day v12
I recon that's a champion effort. Well done.
In fact your a champ yourself for getting yourself to this point through all your troubles.
Past on my regards to you wife as well for having the patience to let you follow your Dream especially in the middle of her house hold.
Follow your journey as always
Regards dave

[v12spirit]

Re: Brick oven reconstructed to a steel one

G'day v12
I recon that's a champion effort. Well done.
In fact your a champ yourself for getting yourself to this point through all your troubles.
Past on my regards to you wife as well for having the patience to let you follow your Dream especially in the middle of her house hold.
Follow your journey as always
Regards dave

Glad about how you evaluate the build as I am used to taking your posts seriously.

[cobblerdave]

Re: Brick oven reconstructed to a steel one

G'day
Mate, You don't need my approval on that. Ultimately it comes down to putting a fire in there and seeing it work. I'm sure it will
Regards dave

[david s]

Re: Brick oven reconstructed to a steel one

V12, your wife must be a saint.

[v12spirit]

Re: Brick oven reconstructed to a steel one

V12, your wife must be a saint.

G'day v12
Past on my regards to you wife as well for having the patience to let you follow your Dream especially in the middle of her house hold.

This thing is in your kitchen, isn't it?
Better hurry up and finish it.
My wife would have run out of patience long ago..........

I hope my wife doesn't see all these posts, I must be taking her patience to alarming levels.

[v12spirit]

Re: Brick oven reconstructed to a steel one

Thinking out loud..

A friend of me opened a bakery in my town. Somehow he managed to bring a big modern "rotary" oven that could bake at controlled temperatures up to 420 C. I was amazed that he was making awesome baguettes in his oven. I asked him to show me the warm room or sweat room where the baguettes should be fermenting. It was simply a 2 square meters room, with a cooker in it boiling a 7 liters pan of water, and a door. I am thinking of the feasibility of copying his warm room as an integrated self-contained unit in my oven.

Making use of the considerable heat from the chimney, I believe the sketch below should work in theory. It is a small insulated metal box over the entrance arch of the oven maybe 40 cm wide, 80 deep, and 30 high, penetrated somehow by the chimney, in it is a shallow water pool surrounding the chimney. The heat from the chimney will make the little amount of water boil relatively fast and steam away in the box. How to maintain a constant feed of water and some other details are simple to achieve by some primitive plumbing techniques and will be skipped for now to the sake of not disturbing the main idea.

This accessory must be useful if I wanted to make homemade baguettes or even as a place to let the pizza dough double in size while the oven is warming up as it must get warm once the oven is lit because it is an insulated metal box penetrated by the chimney. I think I should have it in my kitchen, especially being run as a self-contained free byproduct of the exhaust heat of the oven. It will make the exciting manipulation of the wood fired oven even more exciting and will expand the cooking range of the oven from pizza and Arabic bread to real light weight fluffy baguettes. I believe that not having such a warm room was making my homemade baguettes lumpish.

The sketch just represents the principle and will be modified for optimum performance as new ideas come along.

[v12spirit]

Re: Brick oven reconstructed to a steel one

Left the clad oven covered with nylon for a couple of weeks, then uncovered it to dry for a week now. Reckon It's time to start curing. Having no thermometer, wondering how I can do the curing properly. An idea came to me in order to compensate for not being able to observe the temperature by observing the amount of wood in the oven; I may start with firing the wood surrounded by four bricks so that I can control the maximum amount of wood for the first day, then make the surrounding bricks 6 instead of 4 the next day, and so on increasing the space where the wood sits surrounded by the bricks. Sounds a rough solution. Any suggestions, ideas,.. ?

[david s]

Re: Brick oven reconstructed to a steel one

I don't think this is a particularly good idea. What you will be doing is concentrating the heat in the centre of the floor and the crown of the dome. The hardest part to heat is the bottom of the sides and this area will be shielded from the heat by your extra bricks. You really need to spread the fire towards the outside of the floor. Try reading the whole of the curing thread, there are better ways of doing it suggested there.

http://www.fornobravo.com/forum/f16/....html#post3869

[v12spirit]

Re: Brick oven reconstructed to a steel one

Have been curing. I have got a couple of cracks so far that I am going to fill with homebrew. Is it better to go stiff or loose with the filling mix?
Another question regarding finishing. I was obliged to make a mold for me to make homemade decorative bricks for the finishing due to delivery limitations. The formula is just sand and white portland cement. What is the economic ratio to save the expensive white cement. The square enclosure decoration will be carrying a water heating tank and a proofing box on top. Not more than 40 kg I reckon. is 1:6, cement:sand strong enough?

[Greenman]

Re: Brick oven reconstructed to a steel one

My personal opinion about filling hairline cracks inside the dome is not to bother. It is the oven settling and plastering the cracks might be an aesthetic balm it makes somewhere between little and no difference to the integrity of the dome.

There is a good chance that whatever you fill the cracks with will fall out.

Just my opinion but I did try it and the fine cracks returned and I have learned to live with them.

[david s]

Re: Brick oven reconstructed to a steel one

Agree, filling cracks is rarely successful.