Had a chance to put on a couple of layers of lime white wash over the dome. I’m really very surprised it came out so white as the first application was pretty much see-through. The 2nd application was less of a surprise (Even though it too was see-through) but I was pleased at quite how white it’s come out. Now just waiting for a free weekend for Tiff to come back and paint him!
Tiff came over to do the artwork on the lime render. It was a shame we lost so much with the lime render covering the mud render, but I think it looks just as good if not better! Now chunks of the egg rise out of the dome.
I also got a chance to render the base. It’ll look a lot better when white washed and painted!
The lime render should keep the water off and allow the water vapour inside to permeate and escape minimising the risk of the dome collapsing.
Three days of digging, sand shuffling and sculpting is done. Read more to see the results!
After about 2hrs in the oven at 50′C they’re starting to dry. You can see that the 100% clay has already started to crack badly.
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
Determining your clay content is fairly simple, all you need is a pickle jar or similar, some clay and some water!
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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Admittedly I accidentally made the dough according to the wrong instructions – it was supposed to be pizza dough.
The pizza was as excellent as it usually is and I took the chance to try my laser thermometer from Maplins. Unfortunately it turns out it only goes to 370′C. My oven is substantially hotter!
Anyway, it was taking twice as long to cook a pizza, which generally means I’ve finished. But this time we tried throwing in the accidentally made dough.
In 25 minutes we had a lovely loaf!
Tasty!
Whenever I fire up the pizza oven I feel I’m possibly doing it for the last time. The brick inner dome is cracked and the outside is disintegrating.
Still, this is the first time I’ve used it in anger entirely myself – I made and rolled the dough, cut up the ingredients and lit the fire.
I used charcoal to fire it this time – a break from the usual wood firings. I started the oven about 2:30pm, it was ready a smidge after 7pm. 6 hrs which is a little below normal. The benefit is that it only takes about a 5KG bag of charcoal, whereas I’d probably burn twice that of wood.
Pizza was of course, very tasty. I tried a new dough which included some whole meal flour. It didn’t crisp in the same way but still good!
My friends Chad and Tanya visited this weekend (bringing a range of beer and cider) mainly to try some of my pizza and experience the delights of “The Man Cave” cinema experience – though we made so much pizza (probably about 20 or so) we never actually got round to doing much in the way of cinema viewing. Chad has pointed out I need a wifi baby monitor so I can sit out in the garden without worrying to much about my baby to be.
As you can see from the above image the insulation on the pizza oven doesn’t really survive the burns I’ve been doing. It should really be encapsulated in a lime render – similarly the large cracks that have formed correspond to the large cracks in the oven itself. It’s pretty much had it and we’re intending on rebuilding it soon. I think the only real way to do it is to have everyone over stomping some mud for the new oven, offer them pizza from the old then rebuild it the next day. We pretty much know how much we need (a lot!) and if we make enough screened material without pointy stones in it it should be an easy process.
At least I know what’s wrong with the current oven – we just didn’t use anywhere near enough sand in it!
Pics below
I'm Tim, a 31yr old ex-Allotmenteer. My wife and I used to have a small 5 rod plot in South Essex where we grew all manner of veg. I'm also involved in brewing the odd keg of beer.
When getting down the allotment got too hard and our circumstances changed we bought a house with a 65ftx30ft garden, which we're converting into a mini orchard and veg beds.
We get up to some weird and wonderful projects - we've built a small boat, a pig roaster (powered by a windscreen wiper), a chicken run, raised beds and try our hands at all sorts of stuff getting us closer to being 'self sufficientish'.
The hope is to introduce chickens soon and hopefully let them free range during the day.
If you want to contact me, you can do so here
