Why I Oughta...

Busy week with the pizza oven.  First, the bottom trays and supports were put in-place .   Then, I cut, bent and placed some rebar into the top of the stand - via the bond beam blocks .  I also cut most of the grid of rebar.   That meant that I could move-on to creating the hearth forms.  I used 1/2" trays and I'd like the hearth to be 4" or so thick, so that means I need 4.5" of height on-top of the stand.  Because of the Bond Beam blocks and their openings, I also need the forms to cover 1.5" of the stand.  That's 6" of form - which means I can't use a 2x6, but had to upgrade to 2x8's. I cut the 2x8's to length, then affixed a 2x4 to the face of them to stiffen them - and prevent bowing.  I used various pieces of lumber to create legs that were just a tiny bit short.  I put the forms together, stood-it-up on the legs and then shimmed in one side for the final height.   Moving around the stand, I leveled up each side usin...

Earlier this week, I updated my wood-fired pizza oven build progress with some photos showing the bottom trays and their supports/bracing cut to size .  I have a couple of things that I need to do (I lifted eight steps - bracing for trays shimmed, rebar to bond beam blocks, fill gaps, cut rebar for grid, set up 2x8 forms, wire them, add drainage pipes and fill remaining cores with sand ) and most of those can go in any order.    Once I had the trays in place, I decided to see if I had enough rebar on hand to complete the job.  That started with bending some of the 1/2" steel rebar for around the bond beam blocks.  Then, I cut the rest for across the top in a grid pattern. Below is a photo showing the rebar bent and laid into the bond-beam blocks.  I'm doing curved rebar at every corner and doubling-it-up with 90-degree corners on top of those curves.   On top of this will be a 4.5" thick hearth, so the rebar you see running across the top of the s...

Last I posted about my backyard DIY pizza oven construction project, I was showing the foundation slab after I had stripped the forms .  The pour went well - thanks to the MudMixer.  Now that the reinforced slab was done, I can move on to building the stand.  That stand is made out of 8x8x16 cinder blocks.  If you go back and look in the archives, you'll see that I went back-and-forth about the dimensions of the slab and stand and after a bunch of thinking/tinker'ing, I ended up deciding on these dimensions : Slab: 72" wide x 80" deep. Stand: 4 blocks wide x 4.5 blocks deep - 62.5" wide x 70.312" deep. Hearth: Same as stand. Oven: 39" interior, 51" exterior side-to-side x 64" front-to-back. That's the slab that I poured: 72" wide (6 feet) by 80" deep (6 feet, 8 inches).  And, so I could go about building the stand with four blocks wide and four-and-a-half blocks deep.   Setting these blocks square is important and I had to pl...