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I know many people lay the floor on a bed of sand to level it and allow for expansion but what about the dome itself assuming it’s laid outside the floor. Is it laid dry on the CaSil or mortared in place? And if laid dry do you put sand underneath?
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I first laid out uncut floor bricks in a herringbone pattern (my pattern of choice) on a flat surface then checked for lippage between adjacent bricks. If there were any outliers; any slightly thin or thick bricks, I swapped them out for a better fitting brick from my pile. Took just a few minutes to swap out the few that needed swapping to get a nice even surface. Then I laid my floor template over them, traced cut lines on to the bricks, and cut as needed.
With my floor bricks good to go, I set them directly on the floor insulation board. No bedding sand needed for me as the insulation surface itself was uniform and flat.
My first course of dome brick also sits directly on the insulation board. I did bed the first course of dome brick in a thin bed of mortar. The bedding mortar serves more to simply stabilize that first course of dome brick than to actually bond it to the insulation.
Prior to setting the first course of dome brick, I wrapped a thin strip of cardboard around the outside circumference of the floor brick, then loosely butted the first course of dome bricks against that cardboard as I mortared them in place. The thickness of the cardboard acts as a spacer. It'll burn away with your first hot fire, leaving a slight gap that will fill with loose ash. That gap, plus the natural gaps between the floor bricks, offer expansion space for the floor brick as they move/expand during your fires.
That was the method that made sense to me for my build.
Hope yours turns out well!
Best, Mongo -
Ok thank you. He’s I was interested in that first course of dome brick.Comment
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