My first Pompeii Brick Pizza Oven - Time Lapse Video

hey everybody here is a time-lapse video of the brick oven I built just the past few weeks took me about a month to do in total and so day one marked out the area where I wanted to pour the concrete slab and basically just started digging the hole it's about six or seven inches deep that's how about how thick the concrete will be after I put the two inches of stone in there this is the next day I didn't spend much time on day one I'm just framing out where the concrete will be poured and once this is framed out I put I think I use about six bags of rocked crushed rock in the bottom of it and that lead some some mesh wire down and in the top right corner I'm cutting the rebar to fit in there once it's cut then I started to pull or after I raise the rebar up a couple inches that it's got concrete on the bottom and the top this is one of the only steps where my wife Carly was it was there to help me I think we mix probably around twenty twenty-five to thirty bags of concrete here the hardest part of this was figuring out where the low spots were filling it in and giving it nice and level the following day we just let it harden and we put our initials in the corner but then realize that the cinder blocks are going to cover it so here I'm laying out the cinder block base for the dome and once I have the base laid out I cut a whole bunch of rebar and in every other hole I place the rebar down basically all the way down inside of it in preparation for the cement that's going to go in this is where I took some angle iron made Ridge from side to side and then cut the block to fit in the angle iron and I'm mixed in the concrete here and fill in each fill in every other hole with concrete to make the sting in nice and sturdy and I went through another 20 bags of cement here I definitely wouldn't have been able to do this job without that cement mixer made made make some cement real easy so now I'm trying to fit this piece of plywood in you just see me crawling under they're putting support beams in I'm building the top part where the dome will sit and it's a three inch cement slab that has to sit on top of the stand so I'm building the frame where the cement will be poured and pretty much doing the same thing I did on the bottom putting the rebar in there and raising it up a little and then doing the cement all over again I went through oh good 15 to 20 bags of 80 pounds of that again on this day and I believe this is probably the last day that I went through cement but it's definitely a workout this time was a little easier because it was up up off the ground I added a lot of extra water that I didn't need so it took a little bit longer to dry so this is the first step of the dome and it's like a ceramic insulating board that is placed down right on top of the cement and this is where the brick floor lays the first thing I did was put some sand down so that like level out the bricks and then I made my way around the circle of the dome cutting the bricks to match the curvature of the ceramic board I had to get a diamond blade for my my chop saw and then I'm creating the floor for the entryway there the next day day ten I believe this is where I was building the archway so I had to build two pieces of wood that kind of gave me the shape of the arch so that I could place the bricks all the way around you can see I'm dry fitting them there just to make sure that I got the spacing right once I got the spacing right then I went back and added mortar and completed the arch this was probably one of the easier steps in the brick lane the archway was done I took full bricks and laid them on end moving this is I decided to bring the fan out because it was it was in the 90s almost every day I was out there fan definitely definitely helped oh and I built the chimney right there - there's the opening for the chimney and you can also see right there I'm laying the bricks on end to start the dome there's a little bit better angle I think this was the point when it the night before it had rained and got water into my GoPro case and the water is starting to fog up the case so it's kind of foggy here but it'll change here in a minute so yeah I just worked my way around putting a little bit of an angle on each brick so that they sat flush against the circle ball and I had to cut one right there a little skinnier so that it would fit now this is a tool called the indispensable tool it's an idea that people use online to make sure that the curvature of the dome is correct all the way around but not only around but as it as you work your way up the wall it keeps the correct distance for the bricks and without that tool I don't think I would have done this nearly as easily as I did just working my way around so if after that first ring I had to cut every brick in half and I believe here there were a few points when I was doing this but it was pouring out so I'm glad I had the tent because this the day that it was definitely lightning all around me so it's pretty slow moving when you get to this point putting the bricks in there one by one you have to make sure you have enough mortar underneath of the brick and then once you set the brick you have to make sure that you get mortar down in the crack too because the heat will go in between the bricks and that the fastest way for the heat to get out so yeah this part of the video is going to become the boring as I get closer and closer to the chimney the ring of bricks that go around will stop and in order to keep going I have to kind of float a bridge of bricks and there'll be an angle where you'll be able to see okay so here I'm just cutting the bricks so that they fit into that little space there a little better and a lot of mortar was used because I didn't get the bricks cut quite where they needed to be and you can start to see that the ring is going to kind of collide with the chimney area so in order for me to continue what I'll have to do is create a bridge that goes along the inside and that was probably the hardest part you'll see it I think I'm on this go around and I believe where I started using the sticks to hold the bricks up after I move because you get to a point where the bricks after you go to the next one the brick wants to kind of slide toward the center and it doesn't go very far but it's enough to kind of mess you up and mess up the next step so here's the part where I'm building the bridge I had to get in there because I had to make some pretty pre intricate cuts to get the angles right and it was a tight squeeze but you can see there's a bridge in that now where I can start to lay bricks on top of and I had to cut a lot of these sticks and each level of bricks that I did the sticks had to get longer and longer so actually had to go purchase a piece of plywood so that I had sticks that would be long enough because I was just using scrap wood for for the plywood sticks at that point right there I had to make some weird shaped bricks to kind of fit around the chimney but also fit on top of that bridge and after that level once that bridge was made I was basically just making full full rotations full circle circles on the UH on the bricklayers just working my way around starting to close in on the on the top and this is this is about where I could see the light at the end of the tunnel I think I spent a good week laying bricks on this dome it took it took a long time and you can see all the sticks on the inside they're holding up the bricks and each level had its own small brick but I had to fit in place and that was a little challenging each time around they don't fit perfect when you get to the end I think I go around one more time but here you can see I'm cutting small bricks I think I'm doing one third brick making my way around still using the sticks and at this point the bricks are almost completely vertical so I had to reach inside I might have went around one more time before I reached inside actually I think I got about halfway on this one realized I wasn't going to be able to get my arm in there if I kept going so I got in there and I pulled that tool out and then I did wanted I just did them one by one and met the final brick there once I had it in place I put it on a mortar in there and just let it sit in there there's a curing fire so I put that in there to kind of cure the oven the oven takes a good four or five good curing fires before you can really get it up to high temperature and at this point I had put a two-inch insulating fiberglass mat over the whole thing cover it with chicken wire and I'm covering it with a refractory mortar which is kind of a heat barrier so that any heat that does go through the brick and through the insulating blanket is stopped by the outside layer of refractory mortar now I don't have any video of the stucco that was put on or the painting that we did afterwards but here are a couple pictures of the stucco the paint and a picture or two of the first pizzas that we made in the seventh I hope you enjoyed this and thanks for watching you

Channel: Shawn Nofziger

Views: 7,562,306

Rating: 4.6946635 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: L2ggDFNaGQc

Length: 13min 20sec (800 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 22 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/citykidonafarm]

This is epic! Love it! So inspiring

[u/asoap]

Question... what is the purpose of the area below the oven? All heat to cook a pizza is still from a fire in the oven, no?

[u/beratgra]

Love this man, also go green!

[u/chuckchuck77546]

What do you think this cost to make? That would have to be special mortar and all.