Make pizza with a plasma cutter, a backhoe and a pile of mud!

Step 8 Arching

I went over to Chris and Tina's, and we laid bricks on the floor in arch-shapes. We laid out two arches: One smaller rowlock arch to frame the inner door and one larger soldier arch to frame the outer door.

Tina took photos of the arches, and then traced the outline of the inside of the arches in Adobe Illustrator. Chris plotted the outlines on his big plotter, taped the plots to masonite, and bandsawed the masonite.

I took the masonite and stapled it to some short sections of 2x4, making one masonite-2x4-masonite sandwich for each arch. At this point I had two arch forms.

I set an arch forms on chopsticks on the hearth and balanced bricks on the forms. Then I took a deep breath and yanked the chopsticks. The form dropped and the arch settled but did not fall. I pushed the form out and filled the gaps in the arch bricks with mud.

Hey presto!