Back in 2012 I built a 36" Pompeii at my home in Washington DC, with copious help from the folks on the forum. You can find my old build thread here: https://community.fornobravo.com/for...-pompeii-in-dc. 11 years and, by my rough estimate, some 2,000 pizzas later, we've moved back to California to be closer to family. So of course I need a new oven!

I was very happy with my old oven, so plus or minus a few tweaks I'm going to build something very similar:
  • 36" floor
  • Half-soldier course, then a hemispherical dome
  • Semicircular arch door, 20" wide at base
  • 4" Cal-Sil board underneath the floor; broken tiles or mosaic or broken glass or something under that, and weep hole in the slab.
  • 3" Ceramic fiber blanket on top of the dome
  • Full enclosure with a sloped roof.
  • Two 4' prep table wings on either side at a 45 degree angle to the oven stand
  • Rather than having the oven landing span the width of the stand, I'm envisioning a round landing right outside the door, and then have the rest of the stand even with the prep tables.
Happy to be back, and hope you all will follow along again--see if I'm any less of an idiot mason a decade later :-). Probably will be a week or two before I start work for real: still need approval from the city planning department, and in any event my shovels are still on a moving truck. Hoping to get this thing up and running sooner rather than later.

Pics are my sketchup design and some bricks laying out the outline of the foundation.
Attached Files