Seeking Shelter From the Storm

As normal for late fall in southern Oregon, the serious rain was literally on the horizon. I figured I’d better get started on building some sort of sturdier, short term shelter for the oven as soon as possible. It was fairly obvious that the blue tarp, rope, bucket, and bags were really not the ticket for long term protection from the weather. Once again, my inexperience and lack of spatial concepts made for an interesting construction process of the temporary cover.

During the next break in the weather, I took the tarp off and started to build a frame for my temporary enclosure. Looking back on it now, I probably should have had a plan or at least asked somebody with some building experience for help...

I figured if I just put up four corner 2x4's and tied them together with sheet metal roofing on a top frame, and threw on some fiberglass insulation I had laying around, it would be “good enough”...apparently not...

After adding more side supports braced with angle brackets tacked into the hearth and plywood siding to stop the sway, it looked like my oven would be dry for the winter...again...apparently not...even half sheet trays diverting rain away from the gaps around the chimney brick and roofing.

It turned out that water would condense on the underside of the metal roofing at night and early morning. In fact it wasn't “just a few drops” it was almost like it rained underneath the roof onto the fiberglass insulation which just greedily soaked up the water. In less than a week, the fiberglass was literally dripping wet when I removed it to create temporary roof structure 2.0

Off came the roofing sheets and down went some plywood as a roof base. I covered the plywood top with Tyvek, and added flashing around the edges. I realized that I’d want something to keep water from dripping down the side of the chimney, so I incorporated flashing into the chimney as I built it up further. I also stepped the chimney bricks in to allow me to firmly set my chimney cap in place (instead of keeping it in place with the BBQ grill and nylon line...ouch!).

Next, I reattached the metal sheets and set them so the flashing embedded in the chimney would drip out onto the sheets and not down into the landing area. That system stopped the very successful internal drip system I had unintentionally created with version 1.0 and made for a reasonable oven shelter that lasted through the wet winter months.






So, here's my Hillbilly shelter for the oven going into the winter of 2009-2010. The empty cart bays in the oven's support base turned out to be a pretty good place to keep some of my stuff dry through the winter as well.

Exhausting Finish

Everyone deserves a good venting system...right? Details...Details...Not only do you have to think about keeping smoke out of your eyes while prepping for a bake, but also making sure any moisture that may have found its way into your oven's insulation has an escape route. One way is to place a vent plug that allows moisture to freely pass out of the dome's insulation through the outside render or facade. That can be as “country easy” as placing a short piece of pipe in place when you render/stucco the dome to provide air/moisture flow from the insulation out and then putting a cut-off beer can over the pipe as a rain cap. Much easier on the eye (and fashion world) would be to use a nice and shiny (and also inexpensive) Hydraulic Breather Cap at the top of the oven dome. Of course the easiest method is to incorporate both a smoke and moisture path through your chimney system.

Since my wife nixed the beer can vent, I decided to go with option three and allow moisture to escape through my chimney system. Since I had to transition from the curved surface of the dome to something level for my brick chimney facade, I decided to lay a piece of angle iron across dome at the back of the chimney box. By simply adding mortar on each side of the dome where the angle iron was laid, I got three support points...left, center, and right. After it was leveled and the mortar set, I made sure there were clear gaps underneath the angle iron for air/moisture to pass from the dome insulation into the chimney box. I then started laying bricks using the angle iron as the back base and built the chimney up a couple more chains. In the first picture, you can see the angle iron (circled in red) set across the back of the chimney box.




In the next picture, the angle iron is circled (1) and part of the vent gap into the chimney box is visible in the back (2). Since the excess angle iron was going to be covered by my final oven facade, I didn't worry too much about looks at this point.

















I had borrowed a tent/canopy from our neighbors to protect the oven from the incoming fall and winter storm(s) while I continued to work on the chimney system. However, I came home one afternoon to find the canopy had been blown up and over the fence into the neighboring field.

I pulled out my trusty blue tarp (mentally thanking our County for not making it illegal to use...since it's considered a visual blight on the planet by many) and tied it down over the oven. Hopefully it would last until I could put a more solid, temporary enclosure in place. Looked like progress on the chimney system would be extremely slow to non-existent for the next couple of months (as would baking). In addition, I had read on the Forno Bravo forum that you could get significant water through the oven opening, so a bucket and an empty perlite bag were put into use. The chimney cap that I’d gotten was too big for just the 8" clay flue liner at this point, so I placed the round grill from my Weber BBQ over the liner to give the cap a place to sit while keeping water from coming down the flue. (Again, please consider it was getting stormy and dark while I was scrambling to create a “water resistant” enclosure.)

Really hoping we get some breaks in the weather soon...this is just plain ugly!

Why Would Anyone Need Oven Temperature Control?

I finally gathered enough courage to fire up the oven to make a pizza*...I thought if they didn’t turn out, well–who would know except those present...so nobody was invited over. I had made some pizza dough the day before and put it in the refrigerator overnight. I pulled the dough out the next day and formed it into small balls. As the dough warmed up, I threw some flour on a wooden peel and tried to form a round pizza skin...boy, was that a lesson in failure (and humility). I finally decided that a small, free-form pizza was the perfect way to go. I put on a minimum of toppings, actually just virgin olive oil, a bit of garlic, and some mozzarella. My first pizza was woefully lacking in almost every way except the fact that it was pizza from an oven I had built. Amazing how that one fact at the time made that pizza the best I’d ever had. So here’s the mandatory picture of my first pizza baked on the 19th of November, 2009, in my handcrafted brick oven at +670F (+350C).

Did you notice the price tag is still on the peel? And now we all know why it's important to stretch your pizza dough to an even thickness...

The next time I fired up the oven I decided that my stored heat needed to be used to bake a loaf of bread (again, since that was the reason I built this huge, hollow, chunk of masonry). I went through my normal routine of making a sourdough loaf and stressed about getting the oven at the correct temperature. Ultimately, my over-concern with getting the oven too hot, led to the oven being a bit too cool ~325F (~163C) for producing the golden brown crusty loaf I had envisioned. Truly, it was one of the palest loaves I’d ever seen, but again...it was from a brick oven I had built and therefore absolutely terrific! (Thank goodness for toasters!) As with the first pizza, here’s a picture with my first loaf of bread (21 November 2009) from the oven.

In further retrospect, maybe wearing a lighter color shirt would have made the loaf look more like an artisan loaf of bread instead of ... that. But at least you now know I'm not trying to hide anything about this first experience with a WFO and the art of bread baking (or in this case, the lack of art)!

And as before, it was wonderful being able to pull the ash and still glowing coals into an ash bin (through the ash slot) just before putting formed dough loaves in the oven. Not having to deal with a hot & messy bucket of ashes at this point in the bake was a significant plus.

So there it was, a couple pizzas and two loaves of bread for a bargain price of $2,677 –who wouldn’t see that as a terrific deal? (Good thing there were no labor costs calculated in that price...hate to see someone shocked and put off doing something like this themselves!)

*In all honesty, even though everybody refers to our brick oven as “the pizza oven” – baking bread was (and still is) my primary goal/reason for having a WFO.

Closing the Door on My Fire Fears

Since the oven has been cured (at least I think it’s been fully cured.) it was time to find out how my oven firing door build was going. I freely admit that I still was a bit twitchy about starting a fire in something I’d built and walking away. Visions of forest fires and singed squirrels continually danced in my head each time I contemplated lighting up. In order to quell my fear, I decided to call the local sheet metal shop about my fire door’s progress.

I had contacted a local sheet metal shop as soon as I had completed the oven’s opening. I took the dimensions of the opening to Mike Z–their “stainless steel guy” and talked with at length about building a fire door for the oven. I had sketched out a few ideas but Mike took on the project with interest...after all, a fire door for a pizza oven has to be more intriguing than doing basic sheet metal work. My primary design “needs” were; 1) the door had to be able to stand alone, 2) the door had to have a set of handles, 3) the door needed to be insulated so the handles would not be “too hot to handle”, and 4) the door could not warp or twist with the heat. He made some cost estimates for me and I gave him the measurements of the oven opening. Mike said it would be a couple weeks before he could fit it into his schedule, but he’d call when it was done or if he had follow-up questions. Well, it seemed like it had been several weeks and I hadn't yet heard from him, so...

I could no longer resist calling and seeing if there was any prediction of completion date. Low and behold, the door had actually just been completed. I was extremely happy with the job he’d done. The door was made of stainless steel and was hollow so it could be filled with perlite. Mike had fitted a cap over the hollow middle section that could be secured with two set screws. The door was a bit heavier (17 lbs) than I had dreamed (and a bit more expensive), but it met all my design needs...and I didn’t have to do anything but write a check for $186.70 and take it home. I had a lot of fun figuring out how the door was going to work for me. I tried putting it up on little pieces of brick to promote low air flow into the chamber, but came to realize that the physics of the opening and the firing chamber was pretty much working well without my help.

Where there's smoke...there's usually more

No problems getting another bag of perlite when we got home. Mixing up and applying the last batch of perlcrete insulation for the oven also went surprisingly well (and quickly). The fact that two things on the list had gone smoothly did make me a bit nervous...after all, that’s just not normal for any of my building projects. I guess I should have just counted it as a fluke and not continued to dwell on it all that week, but then that—that wouldn't have been normal either...oh boy...here I go again.

My plan was to have a path for moisture from the perlcrete to escape out the chimney/flue system. Once the chimney rose above the smoke collection chamber, I intended to nest my primary clay chimney (8" diameter) inside a 12" clay chimney flue up to the rain cap and cinder screen on top. (I know in many English speaking, European countries this is called a chimney pot...but as colorful as the term is, it sadly just doesn't seem appropriate here in Oregon with our new Marijuana laws.) I had built a smoke collection chamber (two sections of 8" clay pipe cut and mortared together to form a single piece that was wider at the bottom and tapered down at the top to match a standard 8" flue pipe).  The picture below shows the 2D concept of the cuts on the flue tiles. (The red sections are the cut outs.) Done properly, the top cut on each tile should leave the outline of half of a flue tile. When the two sections are brought together, an 8" clay flue tile should sit directly on top (hopefully, flush) of the smoke collection chamber construct.

I’d seen a similar illustration on the Forno Bravo forum and thought it looked simple enough to do... Remember I said in an earlier post that I was spatially challenged? Well, it took me quite a while to actually turn the illustration into the desired smoke collection chamber. The keys were realizing that a square was really helpful for setting up the required cuts, but a construction marker/pencil was not really good for marking the cut lines (score one for a black magic marker). The other problem, at least for me, was that I could mark one side and begin the cut (with a diamond blade on my skill saw) but when I started going around the “tube” it was difficult to keep on line or even figure out where the line was (you see, if you use a construction pencil, the graphite is blown right off the surface by the clay particles whizzing out of the cut)... It also didn’t help that trying to hold & turn a heavy piece of clay tile in one hand while trying to control a skill saw with the other, is a feat somewhat beyond my capabilities (or at least it was against my resolve to retain all my fingers and both of my hands throughout this project).

Eventually, I did get two tiles cut (while retaining all my digits) and was able to mortar them together. (Just so you know, I did butcher one "test" tile section beyond all hope. I guess you could say I wanted to develop some experience before doing the final work...but that would be stretching the truth quite a bit.)

Below is a picture of the final flue piece, joined with mortar, and sitting on top of the oven's entry arch smoke vault. It doesn’t look all that impressive, but the enlarged lower section does help significantly to gather/collect the smoke from the oven and let it pass smoothly into the upper chimney sections.

Some of you may notice that my construct doesn’t look exactly like my drawing...and you’re correct. I basically spent a lot of time with my saw and new grinder trying to just get the two pieces to fit together (remember, I'm spatially challenged), so I had a wider base and a top upon which to set the next tile...so, yes as usual there is the ideal (and correct way) and then there’s my way.

I know that my struggle constructing the smoke chamber was directly related to the easy time I had with the last of the perlcrete application. Some sort of cosmic/comic justice I suppose, that was imposed just to keep me really humble.

p.s. I realized later (too late), that I assumed...yes, I know 😞...that an 8" flue tile was referring to the inside measurement. FYI, an 8" flue tile provides a 6" internal diameter...perfect for a smaller oven!