more dome photos

ok .. i really enjoyed this project so i'm going to follow it through to its completion .. now we're on site, at the 'new' jj hapgood store, established (i think) in 1827, in peru, vermont.  the entire store is currently being totally rebuilt by new owners.  above is the domed form from my previous post, set up and ready to go for pete to build their new 72" diameter wood fired pizza oven. click the photos to enlarge them..

 here's a view from above, showing the circular buttress wall with the angled top that the firebricks that make up the roof of the dome will rest against, and be supported by.  from an engineering standpoint, the forces of the weight of the dome are transferred to the side walls, which have to have enough mass to support that weight. see flying buttress ...

 anyway, it's a soldier course of vertical firebricks and a 6" thick curved concrete wall loaded with 3/4" rebar.

the front arched door, through which the form will be removed is complete and ready for the flue for the smoke to escape to be built just behind it.  you can see that arrangement in the photo above this one, and the smoke will wend its way over to the hole in the flue in the back corner, and on its way, possibly heat some hot water .. in the end, all this stuff, including the 2.5" thick soapstone hearth will be pretty much invisible, so i'm glad to know what kind of effort goes into one of these ovens.  for more info, see the previous post.  and, to contact pete to order your own brick oven, here's a link to his website, vermont brick ovens.

the dome ... part 2

phew ! .. the dome left today at around 5:00 ... a challenging project if ever there was one, and we plan to help set it up for the new oven on site tomorrow or friday.  watta project !!  here's a link to the previous post on the early stages of construction ... ignorance breeds confidence ...we had no idea what we were getting into.

in this photo, you can see pete, the mason brother in law, of vermont brick ovens, on the left, and trevor, admiring the collapsing mechanism.  if you enlarge the photo, (click it),  there's a handwheel on the vertical stem, and when you turn it, the 'hub' drops and the ribs can be removed one at a time through the oven door, or more likely from the collapsed pile of parts.

when he's ready, we'll be helping pete set it up for his current project.  he's currently working on the soldier course that stands vertically around the 72" diameter .. here's a photo of that in the works.

in case you missed the first post, it'll look like this when it's done.

well, it was quite a trip getting this project together .. lots of head scratching, lots of glue, (over a gallon) and some sanding and bondoing ... here are some more photos of the process ...

 early on, with the 'glue up form' still in use .. see this link for other early photos

 here we're getting the shim blocks (later knocked out to collapse the form) figured out ... 

in the end, we made two different versions ..

 sanding and fitting the rough glued pieces .. it ain't perfect, but there aren't any 

cracks that a half a brick can fall through ...

tah dah .. on to bondo and paint

the holes were from the ten thousand screws we used to make the five layers of bending plywood do what they had absolutely no interest in doing, which is form part of a sphere.

 a previous vermont brick oven project  in manchester, for which we made a different form 

that was a lot more complex and time consuming to set up than this one ..

we realized as we were packing it up .. damn! we missed our chance.  we shoulda painted 

the north pole, hudson bay, and sweden to alaska on it ...

 i will NOT be going into the wood globe business ..... all for now.