Further clay experiments

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How do you know you’ve got the best wife ever? Well, when you come home, eat dinner and then announce “I need to go into the garden and make mud bricks!” rather than putting your son to bed. She calmly accepts this and even let’s you bake them gently in the oven.

I’ve made a 100% clay brick, 50%, 45%, 42.5%, 40%, 35%, 30% & 25%. Mixed it thoroughly. Read more for the calculations

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Clay content 24hrs later

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Last night I’m glad I added the lines. It had already settled further, currently reducing the sand to clay ratio to about 1:2.5. Good! Less sand. We’ll see how much less by Friday.

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Norfolk Pizza Oven revamped.

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You may remember this post about my friends birthday oven fail: http://www.waark.com/2013/05/cob-pizza-oven/ when I added too much water to the mix and our hard work flopped. Well, the next Day Kris reused the cob and made another! This one was much more of a success and only took 2hrs as the cob was ready to load up. He used straw in the thermal mass and said he believes it adds strength and prevents cracking. Most people don’t recommend this, so it’s a good experiment. I have a horrible feeling the temperature will destroy the straw in the thermal mass creating cavities when the strands shrink to ash. This will make it weak and it’ll crumble. We’ll see! Good luck Kris! ( lots more pics on the read more)

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Clay content

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Determining your clay content is fairly simple, all you need is a pickle jar or similar, some clay and some water!

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Garden update

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Another good weekend out in the garden. Helen harvested the last spring cabbage & I pottered around

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Death to the pizza oven, long live the pizza oven

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All good things come to an end, and with a bank holiday coming up I fancied rebuilding the oven with better insulation etc.
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Garden update

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As you can see the spring cabbages are coming along great!

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Front garden

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The main reason I’ve avoided the front garden for so long was the three tree stumps left after I hacked down several bushes. Today however

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BLT

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Just a point to say salad is definitely in season!

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Evening “out”

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Bottle of wine, my latest welding creation (pig stove!), bottle of Rioja, Ipod & kindle, sorted.

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