Thread: Building a pizza oven

Whilst we were doing various bits and bobs with the house I was still occasionally having a look on the web for firebricks when Google threw up a listing on Bahtsold:



The ad was for 310 firebricks together with 4 tubs of mortar for Baht 5,100. It was considerably more materials than I'd wanted, but I called to see if I could get 20 or so bricks.

The lady who answered said that she was only interested in selling them as a job lot as she wanted to get rid of them all. She'd bought them as she was opening an Italian restaurant in one of the new Bangkok shopping malls and had wanted a wood-fired pizza oven in there. Unfortunately (fortunately) the mall management had deemed anything with an open fire to be too high risk for their nice new shiny mall, so she wasn't allowed to install it.

So what we had here was basically a commercial grade wood-fired pizza oven, albeit in parts.

Some assembly required, how difficult could it be putting it together? (A rhetorical question there Humbert...!)

Fortune favours the brave, so I piled into the old Hilux we have and went down to Nonthaburi to pick them up.

One thing about fire bricks is that, en masse, they are actually remarkably heavy. I'd loaded about 160 of the things - stacked 5 high at the front of the bed - and the truck was taking on a distinctive tail heavy stance. There was no way I was going to load them all then drive for five hours back through the night in an old, heavily overladen pickup truck. Something would go wrong. I therefore ended up taking two trips to Bangkok to collect them.

So far then, total investment was Baht 5,100, plus two days driving and a bit for fuel...

... and I now had firebricks aplenty.

As a side note: I did try to work out whether the pickup truck's maximum payload would have allowed it to carry all the bricks in one go and it seemed fairly close. I then realised that the unknowns were things like the weight of the Carryboy top together with all the other crap we put in and on them (drivers, fuel etc). At the end of the day the thing looked and felt heavy at 160 bricks so that's what I took.

C'mon Roob's...I bet the fooker is up and running.

It's like watching a porn film!

So I ended up with a pile of odd looking bricks outside the house and it was time to spill the beans to the missus. The main reason for this was not so much that I needed her buy in for the project, as the project had now taken a considerably larger turn than I'd imagined and I was not actually that sure what it would involve, but more that I didn't want the Chaang, who was still pottering around doing stuff, to use the bricks to chuck in some foundations or something.

We told the Chaang that these were special, magical Farang bricks, and cost 50 baht a piece and that he wasn't to touch them.

'Ha sip Baht - Farang baa................'

Easier than explain the concept of a pizza oven to him.

Originally Posted by charleyboy

It's like watching a porn film!

I blame Nawty for that...

Actually it wasn't that difficult, so I kept going:



You can see at the back of the pic some sticks in the ground. The excavation was going at a cracking pace so I'd marked out the extent of my ambitions. After lunch I continued:

Originally Posted by baldrick

did he do your supablock ? I am thinking about getting some brickwork done

He did everything. I can give you his phone number if you want.

It has to be said that I'd somewhat omitted to take into account that the amount of soil to take out increased the further I went into the slope and so progress began to slow, but after three days I'd had a decent workout and we ended up with this:





It's difficult to give a sense of scale, but the yellow handled hammer thing is actually a sledgehammer. It was an awful lot of soil.

You may ask why we didn't simply get a digger to come and do the work. The only one we could find in the village was some massive tracked thing that would tear up all the grass to get to where we needed to dig. The other option was a tractor with a blade, but I wasn't that sure we would have got what I needed using one.

Anyway, I reckoned that if I wasn't digging I would be painting or even worse, sanding and varnishing floors in the house so it was a displacement activity that gave me three days of splendid isolation where nobody came to bother me as I was clearly doing deranged farang stuff.

^^ Looks like a great spot for a sala and an oven.

My hole in the ground sat for a while in part because it started raining and for a while the thing filled up with water, and in part because our regular Chaang was building something somewhere else.

In the meantime my Google meanderings had led me to look at outdoor kitchens that folks seem to build. There were some pretty spectacular examples on the net:









Now, I suspect all of these to be have been fairly expensive for their respective owners to build and that was not on the cards here, but...

... I already had the bits for the pizza oven and a rough idea on how to make one. I had an old catering stainless steel gas grill thing looking for a home and I had a suitably sized hole in the ground. The rest of it I reckoned was just brickwork.

A plan was forming.

Originally Posted by bankao dreamer

Roob I don't wish to sound alarmist but there is something wrong with your face, I saw something similar in an episode of Dr Who. Have you checked for aliens or other strange events locally. Have any of the locals shown any strange behaviour like lethargy or catatonic trances.

You should see me without makeup on...

Originally Posted by CSFFan

^^ Looks like a great spot for a sala and an oven.

Yup, like much of what we've done up there things were never planned, they just sort of happened that way. I could be all mystical and say that the land spoke to me, but it would be a load of tosh. I just start doing something until either I get bored or it turns out to be crap.

On the offchance that whatever project I do holds my enthusiasm for long enough, it doesn't collapse or be generally considered to by all around to be a tremendous eyesore then it gets to stay.

Are you building a pizza oven or a swimming pool?

Time to have a bit of a look at the firebricks.

They came in three shapes. I had about 45 rectangular, normal brick-shaped ones, there were also about 45 wedge shaped ones, and the rest were wedge shaped but less than the other ones, they fell somewhere in between the other two shapes.

I put them together to try to get an idea of what the various radiuses were likely to be.

Here's a pic of Roobarb minor using them as a decent spot to eat his sarnies, but it should give the idea:

Originally Posted by charleyboy

Are you building a pizza oven or a swimming pool?

It did actually occur to me to keep going and make it into a pool, but then I'd still not have a pizza oven and would have had to find somewhere else for it instead.

Now the plans that I was going to follow are pretty well documented on the link I gave - in fact they are the actual plans. On the assumption that you're not going to want to wade through them unless you're going to have a crack at building one of these ovens I'll give you the brief overview here.

Effectively this sort of pizza oven is a dome shape with an arched front. The chimney sits in front of the inner arch so that the inside of the oven is, with the exception of the arched doorway, a perfect dome (well, Isaan perfect but you get the idea).

Cold air comes in through the bottom of the oven door, gets heated by the fire then shoots around the top of the dome and basically circles round and round getting hotter and hotter.

Smoke - and a fair amount of heat - comes out of the top of the doorway and then disappears up the chimney just outside the inner doorway. Something like this:



It'll probably become more apparent how it works as we build the thing.

The one important bit that every website seemed to emphasise was the internal door height should be about 62 to 64% of the height of the inside of the dome. Other than that there were no real rules to the thing. Lots of insulation was deemed a good idea by everyone.

Now having anything built in rural Thailand within a tolerance of about 2% of something else is a challenge, especially when we are dealing with things like brick domes which do fall outside the experience of the local village builders, but then again it can't be that difficult either and even if the oven is not optimally efficient, with enough of a fire going we should be good for pizza.

The Forno Bravo plans give two options in terms of size, a 36" oven or a 42" one. you can actually make them any size but they reckoned that for home use something between these is about optimal. I reckoned on building a 42" one for three reasons:

1) I had plenty of bricks and the radius of the larger wedged ones naturally lent themselves to that size

2) Somewhere someone had said that a 42" one would have a 21" dome so a door maximum opening height of just over 13". A 36" one's door would be just above 11" high. Not an issue for pizza, but useful to have the bigger door for doing roast turkey and the like. Now, I don't think I'll ever roast a turkey in the thing, but it's nice to have the option if I ever feel the need.

3) A general feeling that bigger must be better.

So the first thing to do was work out the footprint of the thing. Again, taken from Forno Bravo's website:



Apologies for those who only know metres and centimetres, it's a US website.

The plan shows the base of the oven arranged in a herringbone fashion. It's not massively important, but arranged that way it does mean that the pizza peel (the sort of paddle thing you put pizzas in and take them out with) is less likely to catch an edge of a brick.

Having done the technical stuff, it was now time to start on the fun bit -

Time to get building...

First up, we needed to create a concrete base for where the oven stand would go, and whilst we were at it we'd do some walls and counters and stuff.

Mr. Chaang and his two henchmen turned up and dived right in:



To be fair to them they hadn't got a clue what we wanted from them so just agreed to turn up and do what I asked for a few days. Truth be told I didn't have much of a clue either and was just making it up as we went along.



The square bit in the foreground with the inset into the slope is the base for the pizza oven. Given that the pizza oven bricks nearly killed my car I know this thing will be heavy when its finished, so the base here is about 8" thick with lots of rebar 'n' stuff. The rest of it (where the counters will go) was about 4" thick with less rebar 'n' stuff.

Another view of the same thing (note the trade off - Mrs Roobarb's vegetable garden taking shape in the background):



The guy on the left is Mr Chaang. He's a good man, always willing to have a crack at trying something different. The fellow in the foreground with the camouflaged hat is the sort of problem solver and works out how to do whatever madcap scheme I've talked his boss into. The chap mixing the cement is good at just that sort of thing. All in all they are a decent team.

It's looking really good!

This is one serious project for a bit of pizza!

Loving it !

Coming along nicely, Roob...

Thanks for the progressive updates.
Quite enjoyable.

Yes, it's a great thread and I'm learning from it too.