Starting on the New Oven

A mud oven requires a lot of mud and clay and sand, so we set about breaking up much of the material from the old oven in order to mix it with the new stuff. (Once again, we were following Kiko Denzer's manual for building an earth oven, and more details of the process can be found here, for the making of our first one.)

(the lawn after winter looks... like we have a dog)

Since it's Covid-19 the world over, we couldn't get the whole gang together for the mixing and mushing and stomping and crushing, so this time it was a family affair. 

And since we didn't have enough sand (and couldn't go buy any) for the dome that forms the interior, we used some of the old earth from the previous oven and put it in plastic bags to make up space, which worked great.

 

We didn't have any newspaper on hand either, so we used paper towel to cover the finished 'egg' dome. This dome is in fact the empty space of the future oven, because it'll be scooped out later, once the oven walls are built upon it.

With the dry material largely prepped, it took a good afternoon to build the sand form inside, and then to mix up the thermal mud mix (3-4 parts sands to 1 part clay/earth, with more clay than garden earth, for sure). This time we added good amounts of store-bought clay that friends had given us over the years. Some of it was rock hard, so I rehydrated it and then added it to the mix. 

  

And then it was time to slap it on, about 3" thick all around, and packed tight. (The photographer cleaned her hands to take a couple of pics, and also made lunch.)

  

While we were building this first thermal layer, a little snail climbed the neighbour's wall.

  

The mud mix may have been a bit wet, because it ended up slumping down a bit to the bottom, but we adjusted it as we went and later cut some of it away so the walls down there wouldn't be too thick. Once this was all done, we let the whole thing dry for about a week.

At which point I started to carve out the door. 

 

But it was still too wet so I waited a bit longer.

The paper towel worked fine to demarcate the line between sand and clay. 

After cutting out the entrance, I wasn't sure I wanted to keep it the same way as before, just a plain opening. I thought maybe we should do something to reinforce the door frame this time, since that's where the oven tends to get most banged up. I thought about it for a while - should I use bricks? It would have been better to build the oven around the bricks first, if we wanted to do that. What about a big piece of flexible metal to form an arch? That'd be easier. But where am I gonna find a piece of flexible metal, especially now that we're in lockdown?

The next morning I went out for the dog walk and look what I found for the taking!

Two beautiful rings of metal.

Crazy! I cut it and started working with it to see how it could fit.

(Well, here I'm cutting the angle iron but you get the idea.)

But in the end, weighing carefully the teachings of the Three Little Pigs, we decided to make the door frame out of brick. It'll be the most solid, and allow us to fashion a door that seals very well, too. I was a little unsure because it seemed like such a cosmic sign to have the metal delivered to me, but I think brick is the way to go, for mud oven 2.0.