51" Oven in France

[Dino_Pizza]

Re: 51" Oven in France

Hi Kosta, glad to see you're back on the forum. I see you and your father have been busy over the winter and the oven is done. Your pizza looks great! I like the eggplant and the mushrooms and the crust looks perfect.

Frances has a good solution for the outer arch draft door but like dmun says, make sure the brick and insulation are dry, make sure you are using dry, seasoned wood then see if you need to tile or brick a facade to the outer arch and drop it and inch or so to keep the smoke in. But wait a few fires and you'll know how much if any to bring it down. Take care, Dino

[Frances]

Re: 51" Oven in France

Ok, lets see how this works...

Its really like a draught door, but gap at the bottom is big enough to add wood without removing it.

Once the fire has started properly the smoke stops coming out the front, and then a higher outer arch has the advantage of giving you more headroom while making pizzas.

[dmun]

Re: 51" Oven in France

Yeah, James is having picture viewing authorization problems after the changes this week. Frances, maybe you could paste into the message the url of the image?

[exipnos]

Re: 51" Oven in France

Thank you Frances. For some reason when I open up your tread, I can see all the messaged but where it says attached thumbnails, I do not see any. Is that the same for anybody else? Could you attach the picture in this thread?

[Frances]

Re: 51" Oven in France

In case you want to keep the higher outer arch (which does cause smoke to come out of the door while firing up), maybe something like this would help - it works very well for me:

http://www.fornobravo.com/forum/f9/s...ucer-5190.html

[dmun]

Re: 51" Oven in France

The AAC may be damp. Give it a a few firings. We don't have depth of experience with AAC, but 100mm (4") should be sufficient.

I have 2 1/2 inches of mineral fiber board, and my support slab stays cool while firing, but it's warm the next morning (that heat has to go somewhere).

As for the smoke issue, what is the size of your flue? How tall is it?

[exipnos]

Re: 51" Oven in France

A second issue to inform the group about. As you can see from the above photo the brick floor is resting on a white surface. That is 10cm thick AAC block. Having read through some threads here it is supposed to be a suitable material. It can take the heat well and supposed to insulate well so quite similar to the vermiculite floor base but without the hassle.

Okay so I'm using this as my floor base and after my first real usage of the oven I checked at the end of the day the concrete floor surface on which the AAC block is resting on. It was warm to the touch. Not hot or anything like that but still warm. From this I can draw two conclusions.

1. 10cm AAC block is not sufficient insulation under the brick floor.
2. Since the oven dome was not covered during the winter months the floor received a lot of rain and AAC block sucks up water like crazy. This is normally not an issue and it eventually goes away without any damage to the material. So maybe the AAC block has not fully dried up yet and not working properly. More to follow on this topic later in the summer when I hope all the fires and dry weather will fully dry up the material.

Cheers,
Kosta

[exipnos]

Re: 51" Oven in France

Hi all,

A couple of questions for the existing pizza oven users.

As you can see from the below pictures I have quite a lot of black sot on my oven opening. The pictures shows the inner oven opening size and also the second arch that is actually higher then the inner arch. This my father did incorrectly but its not a big deal and I was just thinking of doing another arch in front that will be the same or slightly shorter then the inner arch (tilting the door slightly when needing to close up). This I hope will help capture the smoke and steer it towards the chimney stack.

I think the oven is drawing well but I'm not actually sure what "well" means. Should there be no black smoke going on the outside or is this normal even with a well drawing oven?

How is the exterior of your oven holding up? Black or clean?

[exipnos]

Re: 51" Oven in France

Finished pizza try 2...

[exipnos]

Re: 51" Oven in France

Finished pizza.

[exipnos]

Re: 51" Oven in France

Short update. I never went ahead with the rebuild. Nothing happened in the winter period and now when my father was back he was keen on finishing up. He managed to close up the oven in a few days time. Last weekend we put the insulation around the dome. 200mm thick rockwool. I was going for the round igloo look but last minute thought it would be to much work and changed for the square house enclosure.

Enclosure done with 7cm AAC which also privides some insulation but I only used it since I had plenty and though it would be a good material to afterward render it.

Curing fires were done this past week and today we did a big fire in preparation for our first pizza baking. Success

After about 1 hour burn (or maybe more didn't really time it) the oven burned off all the thick sot and turned white. I then spread the coal around and let it burn down most of the coal. Then pushed all the coal to the side and clean up part of the surface.

The first pizza's baked in less then 2 minutes and they were great. Crust was beautiful and crisp. Very windy outside today and I don't have any pizza peel tools so I was opening up the crust inside and putting it on my home made pizza peel, then run outside to put it into the oven. Fun for the fist couple of runs but got tired after a while.

I'm building the counter in front of the oven so in the future it will be more simple to cook right next to the oven.

Overall I'm very happy about the progress and the performance.

[Justin]

Re: 51" Oven in France

Sunset in Sydney Australia is at 7:45 tonight i love these long days for getting stuff done! Goodluck with the rebuild mate!

[exipnos]

Re: 51" Oven in France

Its difficult to work on the oven during the week since after work its already dark. Tomorrow is the big day and if weather permits I hope to rebuild the opening (it got demolished) and close up the 4 or 5 existing courses. Then hopefully I can do the sixth course on Sunday.

[Justin]

Re: 51" Oven in France

Quick question to our knowledgeable members. This weekend I'm going to grout all the internal gaps and fill them with the special refractory mortar. But my mortar is quite dark in color (almost a light black). I wanted to have a lighter mortar and wonder if there is anything I can do about it? Can I add some pigment into the mix?

How did this go? you my find it dries a lot lighter.

[exipnos]

Re: 51" Oven in France

i just hope your dad never stumbles across this site!! YIKES for you!

No problems. He doesn't speak English but I've showed him the site many times. I've also said exactly the same things to him in person. Funny thing with my father is that he thinks things are easy. At the end after completing several courses and seeing the results I'm sure he now also would have preferred to taper the bricks for a more even look.