A closeup of the oven door: open for business.
Well technically, construction on the oven was finished on November 22, 2011, but it needed four to six weeks to cure properly before it could be used. The next step is to “pre-fire” the oven to drive out any residual moisture and burn out any possible impurities or organics that were in the clay.
Since the last posting about the oven it has been a busy couple months, so here is a quick pictorial essay covering the remainder of the build. And of course, the long awaited stop motion video of this build will be up soon! Look for that in the next post.
The crew posts up for a well earned pizza part following completion of the oven.
The interior dome form and floor brick layer ready for dome construction.
An igloo, or an oven?
The first layer of the dome is done. The board and wire show where the chimney will be.
All hands getting dirty for the final layers of the dome.
Final layer of the dome form is finished.
Voltaire and Ryan finish up the diamond lathe to get ready for tiling.
A man possessed: Patrick single handedly removes the interior dome form.
Ready for the tiling!
The first round of tiles finds a new home.
Lots of cleaning and scraping to be done.
Grouting the tiles and applying the final adobe to the base.
Basically done! Some cleanup to do still. And remove that tape...
The interior surface of the dome.
So fresh and so clean; the new oven gets ready to hibernate for a month.
A big congratulations to everyone who worked on the oven. The tenth grade students put in some serious work on this thing, with many of them staying after school to help keep the project on schedule. All that’s left to do now is fire it up and make some delicious pizzas!
