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Hi all, new ambitious oven owner here.
I am going for a pretty standard hemisphere-on-a-row-of-soldiers design, but i have to admit I hit a bottleneck when it comes to brick sizing, in regards to the resulting joint gap.
The overall goal is to avoid multiple and angled cuts on the bricks. So, for the square-cornered bricks, on the interior of the dome i will just get them to touch at one corner and then the resulting joint gap won't be more than 3mm (1/8 in), that's the easy part.
But what grinds my gears is how big should I allow the joint gap to be on the exterior side, considering the overall joint bond strength and thermal-shift behaviour.
Naturally going upwards towards the top rings of the dome the width of the brick must shorten, as to reduce the joint gap (both on the inside and outside of the dome), but what is the absolute threshold I should aim for? Does a rule of thumb exist? I guess it is eventually mortar-brand dependant and on the very top rings beveled bricks are inevitable, but like i said the goal is to minimise brick cutting so to cut only when necessary, i.e. max joint gap reached.
I am surprised that a thread somewhere doesn't exist already, or if I didn't find it please refer me.
Thanks all.
I am going for a pretty standard hemisphere-on-a-row-of-soldiers design, but i have to admit I hit a bottleneck when it comes to brick sizing, in regards to the resulting joint gap.
The overall goal is to avoid multiple and angled cuts on the bricks. So, for the square-cornered bricks, on the interior of the dome i will just get them to touch at one corner and then the resulting joint gap won't be more than 3mm (1/8 in), that's the easy part.
But what grinds my gears is how big should I allow the joint gap to be on the exterior side, considering the overall joint bond strength and thermal-shift behaviour.
Naturally going upwards towards the top rings of the dome the width of the brick must shorten, as to reduce the joint gap (both on the inside and outside of the dome), but what is the absolute threshold I should aim for? Does a rule of thumb exist? I guess it is eventually mortar-brand dependant and on the very top rings beveled bricks are inevitable, but like i said the goal is to minimise brick cutting so to cut only when necessary, i.e. max joint gap reached.
I am surprised that a thread somewhere doesn't exist already, or if I didn't find it please refer me.
Thanks all.