stacked brick oven in the making

[dellavecchia]

Excellent job. What was the bake time?

John

[shuboyje]

How long did it take to fire?  I really though the extra mass in the walls was gonna give you a bit of a hard time, but the pizza looks great.

[norma427]

Dylan,

Very creative oven build and great looking pizza!

Norma

[scott123]

Regular brick (non firebrick) + high heat = potential explosion = potential danger

[dylandylan]

Thanks for the comments all.

high heat = potential explosion = potential danger

Thanks - I'll consider myself warned.   I've been mindful of that possibility and have read a few cautionary tales.  I'm intending to replace the ceiling with fire bricks before the next bake, and will cycle out the others for fire brick as I can.

As the the specifics - I'm afraid I didn't take any notes or many measurements....  my recollections are:
 
Bake time... 2:30 to about 3 mins seems about right, I think!  Didn't think to stopwatch it, but will attempt to remember next time.

Temperatures... varied a lot, but were about 400-500 on the deck, and 800-900 on the dome.

Undersides... fairly pale.  Just as pale as my home oven pizza in fact. Cooked well, but barely browning by the time they were ready on top.  No pics, they looked fairly unexciting.

Heat-up time...  I think it was about 3-4 hours but I didn't look at the clock once all day.  Next firing I'll look to preheat a lot longer to get better heat saturation, especially more into the floor.  I think the embers were only just starting to warm up the floor when my patience ran out and I started baking.

Dough... was a 36-ish hour sourdough.  I didn't time the dough particularly well as it was guesswork as to when the oven might be ready to cook with.

[Jet_deck]

Good job.  I say the ground is sucking the heat out of the floor.  Do you have any isulation that you can put down first and restack the whole thing?  Anything would improve your results. 

My $.02

[Tscarborough]

Clay brick are fired to far higher temps than you are able to reach.  They will eventually spall and deteriorate, but not any year soon.  Solid soft brick are best, do not use brick with holes in them and you are fine.  Concrete brick on the other hand will explosively decompose on being fired.

[dylandylan]

@Tscarborough - thanks for the info, that's reassuring.   I've been reading up on the various types of brick.   I've just picked up a ceiling's worth of fire brick, exactly the same spec as the floor.  The next bake will use them.

Out of interest, why are the bricks with holes bad?   The ceiling that I used for this bake were bricks with bout 8 holes in each brick - presumably to make them able to be reinforced.

[Tscarborough]

The holes are to save material and to allow for more even firing.  They mean they are modern extruded brick as opposed to old pressed brick.  The face is more likely to delaminate that is all.

[dylandylan]

Ok interesting.  I'll relegate those holey bricks to the outer layers and remove them entirely once I have enough fire brick.  I've been looking around at insulation possibilities and may also clad the entire thing in an aluminium shell with a vent/flue.   This is a very slippery slope I'm on.

[PizzaJerk]

Regular brick (non firebrick) + high heat = potential explosion = potential danger

I read that solid clay brick is a suitable substitute for firebrick. Do you think that it would hold up to the rigors of the heat generated in the oven?

http://www.ehow.com/info_8635055_fire-brick-substitutes.html (don't know how true this info is)

These seem to fit the description of solid clay (I'm also just going by what the description tells me of course) please correct me if I'm wrong.
http://www.lowes.com/ProductDisplay?partNumber=34454-22076-110100400&langId=-1&storeId=10151&productId=3613902&catalogId=10051&cmRelshp=rel&rel=nofollow&cId=PDIO1

I am also flirting with the idea of constructing a small oven, interested to see how this turns out.

[Tscarborough]

That is an extruded wire cut brick.  It would be my last choice, if I would even use it at all.  You want a dry pressed molded brick, like the one below, or an old common solid.

[PizzaJerk]

That is an extruded wire cut brick.  It would be my last choice, if I would even use it at all.  You want a dry pressed molded brick, like the one below, or an old common solid.

Excellent. Now that I see both photos in comparison, you can really see how inferior the brick from Lowes is. At least for the purposes of making an oven.