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I built a brick pizza oven
I built a brick pizza oven
This was actually the second pizza oven I built. The first one was quick and scrappy, originally built for my History of Technology class.
The first version had a couple caveats:
We weren’t allowed to make anything permanent; AKA no mortaring anything (there was an unfortunate incident a few years ago where students made a historically accurate Roman road, basically a solid rock, that was impossible to move at the end of the year)
We had essentially no budget
Despite the scrappiness of the first pizza oven, it was a huge success, and we ran two more pizza parties that year, serving pizza to the school. But before we knew it, the end of year came and we had to deconstruct it. Coming into my senior year, the school gave us the go-ahead to build a bigger, better, permanant pizza oven for the school. So began Pizza Oven V2!
After lots of reading and sketches, we settled on an arch design with a chimney that would direct the heat over the pizza for more even cooking. I then did some quick CAD before looking into the construction.
But first, we needed a cart to construct the pizza oven on top of. Pizza oven V1 was built on a welding table but the welding table had to be used for welding and the heat of the oven was warping the steep plate surface. After scouring online and not finding anything suiting our needs within our budget, I decided to build one myself. I designed it to use as much scrap steel tubing as possible, and bricks for the surface.
The process of actually building the oven required alot of research and was greatly hindered by uncharacteristic California rain. After alot of research, we settled on using standard mortor rather than refractory cement because it would require hundreds of firings for the mortor to even begin breaking down and we didn't think the oven would be seeing thaatt much use.
I started by building a frame and covering it with a flexible plastic. This would act as the mold to lay the bricks over. Then, just before I layed the bricks for the back wall, I pulled the frame out the back, at which point the arch was fully built so it could sustain its' own weight. The last step was to fill in the back wall and add a chimney. Unfortunately, this process took longer than we had hoped, given that we were novices at brick laying and the wet weather caused the morter to take a long time to dry.
But eventually, we got a complete, functional, pizza oven! And ate some delicious pizza!
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