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!