How to build a Pizza Oven

Step 4: Building the sand mound

To define the interior shape of your oven, you have to build a sand mound. To do this, you also have to insert your oven door. The easiest way to make your door, is sawing it out of wood. It's best to use some fire resistant wood like oak. Before you close your oven for baking, you can soak it in water.
For my oven, i had to mount the oven door somehow. I got it from my neighbor, he has a whole lot of them around in different shapes and sizes. He's a retired blacksmith who still has his shop and is still working, but only on jobs he likes. I wanted to mount it decoupled from the hot oven, so i mounted it to the concrete plate. This was made because of the different expansion under heat. As a next step, i added a ring made of cardboard in order to have the inner walls going straight up. This way, it's easier to remove the ash and i have more usable space for baking. We added some more cardboard to stabilize the sand mound around the oven door. It is important to use "sharp" sand, no beach or round sand. It also needs the right moisture content, otherwise your mound will fall apart. As a further effort to stabilize the mound, we used paper with paste or goo on it. (I'm not sure about paste or goo. I mean the stuff you use on wallpaper.)

Comments

[leoneill]

Thank you ever so much for taking all the trouble to document this and yr cleAr instructions. You never have to apologetically eexplain you are not originally an English speaker, because yr English puts most of us to shaME! I would like to see pictures & dimensions of your brick moulds & how you made them, the moulds.Did you fire them or just let them dry. Thanks so very much. May you win the lottery tomorrow! --mo

[t.rohner]

We didn't have a mould to make the bricks, we just cut a piece out of the kneaded building material and pressed it into the needed form. Since the oven is round, most bricks had to have a form similar to a slice of a pie. The length of it was 20cm / 8inches in our case, i wouldn't make it shorter than 15cm / 6 inches. The length gives you the thickness of the thermal layer. The height and width was in the range of 10cm / 4 inches. Then we pressed the bricks into the oven wall while they were still wet and somewhat soft. You should be able to see it in the pictures, especially in step 3 and 5. The bricks are not fired, maybe one inch on the inside gets fired by using the oven. But on the outside it's not fired, that's why we need a roof to keep the rain away. When you klick on the little " i " on the upper left corner of a picture and then on the pixel dimensions under the image, you can see the pictures in full resolution.(7MP in my case)