# Forum Home Renovation Brickwork  Pizza Oven build

## Marc

I finally came around to build a pizza oven. Done it before with common bricks and mud.
 It worked OK but this time I wanted to do a bit better. 
I checked youtube, but found too many professors that had graduated after building one oven and not particularly good. 
So I bought a book, by a baker that has built some 10 oven and uses his own in his bakery every day. Plus he uses common bricks and not $1000 in refractory bricks.  https://www.bookdepository.com/Your-...UaAmjCEALw_wcB 
Suits me because I have a pile of second hand clay pavers and a perfectly good brick saw.  
To start I had to find a good place for the oven. Under cover yet with good ventilation. Under the house seemed like the best position.
So I started to dig for the base footings.
Had to go a bit over the top because the ground shifts since it is on the edge of a hill. It does not shift a lot but it does. I thought digging a hole in each corner that goes 800 deep would do the trick.

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## Marc

Once the base concrete was ready to get some load, I started to build the walls with 190 x 190 x 390 besser blocks    
The front of the base needs an opening to store the firewood, so i needed a lintel. I had a few left over lintel blocks from another job. They need 12mm steel, so I tied a bunch of 3 reo rods and plonked them in the cavity. This photo shows the lintel with the formwork already in place.

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## Marc

And then the top slab.
To keep side timber boards in place, i drilled a hole in the timber and had a double fence wire going through. Two in the longer run and one in the shorter. 
A bit of twisting gave it the tension required. It worked a treat.       Attachment 125427  Attachment 125431  Attachment 125432

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## Marc

And so the actual oven construction starts. First comes the floor.
Concrete does not like heat. The water that becomes part of the concrete when it cures, starts to vaporise yet it is trapped inside the rest of the concrete and caneventualy explode. So it is important to isolate the concrete from the heat. 
For that I used 50mm insulating bricks to cover the whole of the footprint for the dome. The dome itself will sit on the insulating bricks.
For that I need to determine the location. A string a weight and a pencil will do.
 . Attachment 125435       
Insulation bricks over the concrete and refractory bricks cut inside the dome, or rather of what will be the dome. The saw was a lifesaver.  .  
To be continued  :Smilie: 
By the way, I have no idea why some photos are the right way and others are not, nor why some come up nice and big and others stay post stamp size.

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## Bros

Are you intending to indulge yourself in pizza on your free food day?

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## Marc

Pizza oven is just what we name this type of wood fired oven in Australia. They are known as bread oven, brick oven and many other names in other countries and languages. 
They have thousands of years in existence and are used to cook any type of food. 
In Malta to name one, the villagers don't have an oven at all, and take their meals in a pot to the local baker to be cooked with the remaining heat after he finished cooking his bread. Or that was the case before the sixties anyway.
So pizza is just one of the things you can cook in there. 
As I prepare to start the dome, I need to build a template for the oven's opening. i will do my best to make the arch all out of full bricks, may be with just the key stone cut in a wedge shape. Planing and measuring is essential.   
The template below is ready to take the bricks. THe template is sitting on the refractory bricks that make the floor of the oven, however I will have to cut out the excess so that the dome sits only on the orange insulation.      
The floor is now cut in and the first row of half bricks is down.
The mortar is refractory mortar. Refractory mortar and bricks supplied yb "Field Furnace" in wetherill park http://www.fieldfurnace.com.au/

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## Marc

And the fun begins. 
In order to make a proper dome, I had to improvise an arm that will guide me to sit the bricks at the proper angle. I did not take a picture close up of the hinge, but it is rather basic. Two lugs screwed to a plywood that pivots on another piece of wood glued to the brick floor. In hindsight, it was not the best solution because it introduces an error since it does not pivot in the center of the sphere, but it is displaced upwards a bit. i should have used a castor wheel from an office chair, remove the wheel and have the arm in place of the wheel.    
At the last minute I realised I needed to pack the arc template or it will never come out. Two yellow tongue served that purpose. 
THe bricks that form the opening need to follow different plane. So I had a string attached to a nail in the center of the arch and that was my guide.

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## Marc

As I progress up the dome, the angle the bricks sit at is steeper every row. The premixed refractory mortar I used is very good and sticky and very forgiving, however at this stage, I have to go one row at the time and give some time for the mortar to set before attempting another row. 
There is a trick to making a dome in one day, and that is making a mold with fibreglass and resin over a physiotherapy ball. It must remain flexible to squeeze through the opening and then push up with a car jack sitting on some bricks to give a base to the top of the dome. I got away with doing it bit by bit. Here I have already finished the opening arch and set the last brick or "key" shaped like a wedge. Very satisfying.    Attachment 125468 
And the time came to set the thermometer. I used a little stick to keep a hole between the bricks and later pulled it out and put the thermometer sensor through it.

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## Uncle Bob

Nice job so far. Great to see you've given up taking photos in portrait mode (it should disabled on all modern cameras if you ask me  :Smilie:  ).

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## Marc

Yes, but they still upload sideways. In fact have a few that are now coming upside down ...  :Frown: 
Can they be turned around?

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## davegol

amazing. been wanting to do this for some time... now I'm tempted again.. keep the pics coming!!

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## Marc

I built the whole dome from the inside, sitting on a besser block and turning around slowly. The oven measures 1.1m inside diameter so that size made it possible.  
When it came to the critical last few bricks I had to go outside, and then I had to come from the opening laying on my back to clean the joint. Not fun. Sorry abut the picture. No idea what is going on here.     Attachment 125477 
This is the inside   
And the finished dome.
You probably noticed that I rendered the bricks as I went. Found it easier to do so all in one go with the refractory mortar. A neighbour who likes to come and watch what I do, asked me ... why do you render the bricks if you are going to cover them with insulation? Good question, probably not required, but I found it easy to just squish the excess around the outside brick and finish with the foam float rather than scraping it clean. I want to believe it will add to the heat sink. May be just a little bit?  :Smilie:

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## Marc

The dome is sitting on the insulating bricks, and now it is time to cut off the excess.  I used a 9" grinder with a diamond blade and a dust mask. Very dusty!

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## Marc

Time to talk about the flue ... no not the flu ...  :Smilie:  
Wood fired oven can have the flue connected to the back of the dome or the front. The flue at the back works OK but the oven takes a long time to heat up because most of the heat goes up the chimney. The flue at the front sucks fresh air from the bottom of the front opening, pushes the flames back and around the top of the dome and then out the top of the opening and in the flue. It is counterintuitive but it works much better.  
In order to have the flue over the oven opening we need a second arch. This arch is independent from the dome, and is built after the dome is finished. The bricks for this arch need to have a cavity and I decided to buy them rather than attempting to cut them myself. Field Furnace Refractory had all i needed.  
To build the arch I had to make a template first.
The edges of the template hold up the bricks shaped like a wedge that form the arch. The timbers across the top of the template are to hold up hte half bricks that form the edge of the chimney, topped up by the curved bricks that merge in the flue ... if that makes sense.       
Then the bricks. Here I am doing a dry run.    
In this picture you can see the flue arch bricks and how they are cut, to create a sort of hood that channels the heat and smoke up the flue. if you look close enough you will notice that the flue arch bricks are not all the same. In order to allow for different size arch, the supplier has different angles available. For my size arch, they gave me a sketch that outlined the line up. It was two parallel, then two small, one big, one small etc. The dry run gave me an idea if this was good or not. 
The rest of the arch from this point onwards is made of short bricks cut off from a full size wedge brick to form the two front and back sides of the chimney. On top go the purposely cast bricks for the merge into the flue.   
Here you can see the flue arch finished with the top special curved bricks to merge into the flue. I would have no hope of cutting them with my brick saw or grinder without breaking a dozen in the process.        
The brickwork is now finished. What follows is insulation, render and flue installation.

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## Marc

Insulation is a ceramic fibre blanket 25mm thick that needs to be applied and secured with chicken wire. Two layers total of 50 mm of insulation. It is nasty stuff that requires to use a mask, the same that is required for asbestos. Once all safe and secured, the render is applied. Again 50 mm of render. What you see here is the first layer applied and tied down with wire, then second layer with chicken wire and tied down with more wire.  
I drove a few nails in the insulation bricks below to have somewhere to tie up the wires with some trepidation, but it was ok. The soft spongy insulation bricks took the nails with no problem.   . 
First layer, like a puzzle. The material has some plasticity so it allows a bit of pushing and stretching to shape to the dome. It cuts very easy with a new blade in the cutter.  . 
Second layer and chicken wire over it. The chicken wire is a pain to settle down. I used cutters to clip to size and thin wire to tie it to each other then soft thick wire to tie it down.

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## Marc

I thought that extending the floor brickwork outwards inside the flue arch was a good idea rather than having a step inside, so I looked for this old fashion bullnose bricks. Found them with Austral bricks, and they fitted inside there rather nicely. I made them protrude a bit over the concrete slab because I intend to glue a mosaic on the front and this way the mosaic will be flush with the bullnose.  
By the way in the two next photos you can see the recess in the flue arch better. It is important to stop smoke from escaping out the opening rather than channel in the flue. Of course not very important if your oven is out in the open.  
When I bought the bullnose bricks, I needed some extra comon shaped bricks to cover the full length. Rather than making them all the same, I staggered one long one short alternating with the bull nose length. I like the effect and the 5 mm difference between one side and the other can not be seen.        
The render was a bit of an adventure. 
Field Furnace recommended I use just sand and cement render, 50 mm thick. 
Somehow I thought that sand and cement was not a good insulation at all, so i went in search of perlite. It turns out that perlite comes in different forms. Some absorb water and others don't. See what Melbourne Fire Brick Co has to say about this. 
By the way they have all you need to build an oven if you are in Melbourne.  https://melbournefirebricks.com.au/n...tefill-perlite  We use LiteFill Perlite to make a strong, lightweight, insulating render material.  Ordinary Perlite is an expanded volcanic glass material, commonly used in hydroponics due to its ability to hold water. This makes it _terrible_ for making lightweight concrete, as you would have to add a significant amount of water to the mix to wet it through completely.  To overcome this, LiteFill Perlite is treated in a solution to give each particle a waterproof coating. This makes it perfect for mixing into lightweight concrete and renders. It has very low thermal conductivity and when used as loose fill, without cement, has a maximum working temperature in excess of 1000°C.  LiteFill comes in 100L bags, and typically a Wood Fired Oven needs 2 to 3 bags to build up a 50mm render shell over the ceramic fibre blanket insulation. We mix the Perlite in the ratio shown below, and build it up in layers 15 to 20mm thick, letting each layer set before the next is applied. *LiteFill Perlite Render Mix Ratio*  *5 Parts Perlite
1 Parts GP Cement
1 Part Lime
1 Part Washed Sand 
If you are in Sydney or Queensland ring up Melbourne Fire Bricks for the phone number of a local retailer. Sorry I lost the number for the Sydney retailer. * To mix this stuff I had to use the mask once more. Perlite is light and fluffy and you don't want that stuff in your lungs. I mixed it in a wheelbarrow and once all is mixed and wet, it's ok to take the mask off, It is only the dry perlite that you must worry about.  The mix needs to be rather dry and the first layer over the ceramix blanket is a challenge but I managed to apply some 6mm or so and let it set. The next day i applied yet another layer and so over and over until I got the 50 mm I wanted. I used two bags of perlite. It turned into a solid yet very light shell that I hope will be a good insulation.   I used a medium size trowel with a round nose rather than the big and pointy trowel used to lay bricks, and smoothed the render with a sponge float once it started to set. The sponge float was very good to smooth out imperfections, and the number of layers I applied, sort of evened out all my mistakes and kept the dome in an almost perfect semi sphere despite my absence of any discernible rendering skills.  It has a rather rough finish due to the size of the perlite particles that substitute sand. I may yet apply a couple of layers of cement render to have a smooth finish.  Next is the flue.

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## Marc

Yes, there is a bit of an erratic behaviour. Deleted and reposted, hopefully it stays there.

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## Bros

How long did it take to build?

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## Bedford

> Yes, there is a bit of an erratic behaviour. Deleted and reposted, hopefully it stays there.

  Thanks, can see them now. 
I'll delete my post above to keep your thread tidy.

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## Marc

> How long did it take to build?

  Like most of my projects they are weekend jobs and take a long time. i have some 100 hours on this one spread over 10 month or so. But I work alone and work slow. Anyone with more enthusiasm and help can do it way faster. Bricklaying experience would also help. Mine is almost nonexistent. 
The funny part of this build is that I first sourced the brick saw in Cash Convertors about 5 years ago for precisely this project. i then used it for cutting pavers and blocks for a lot of other projects that pushed the oven to the back burner for years. All comes to who can wait ... or words to that effect.  :Smilie:

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## METRIX

Looks good, I have an old brick built in outdoor flued fireplace and was going to convert it to a Pizza oven, but looks like a lot of work for a bit of crispy bread and a few toppings.

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## Marc

If you already have the structure and all you need is the dome, that would be just a weekend project, not the epic build above. 
Buy yourself the book in the link above. There are examples of dome that are built inside a cubic cavity ( or prisma ) and then filled with insulation between dome and walls. You don't need to use ceramic insulation, dry sand will do.
The dome can be done with common bricks and the mortar can be mud if you have clay in the ground. Done it before with no money at all.

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## Marc

Meantime and till I figure out the flue and take pictures ... if you feel that this build is overwhelming and perhaps too expensive ( because it is expensive ), yet you still want a pizza oven ... go to youtube and google "Earthen Oven". There are many minimalist videos that show with various degrees of accuracy or lack of it, how to make an oven with no money and little work. 
Her is one. It is on the small side at 22" diameter but you can make it the size you want. The period clothes are not required  :Smilie:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i0foHjPVbP4

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## Marc

Ok ... got around to get all the flue parts in place. Not easy. Needed the transition from brick to metal, two 45 to get to the horizontal section and one 90 to go up past the roof.  
This bracket holds up the whole stack so it is bolted with 8 mm stainless to a stainless angle 1.2 meters long above the roof sheets. The roof has no rafters and is screwed at both ends relying on the sheet stiffness. It holds my weight up if I step on a couple of boards, so good enough.      
This bracket, I made to hold the stack against the edge of the roof above. Works a treat and after drilling 3 holes for the hat and the last two sections with 3 screws, the whole stack is nice and strong.   
But ... there was a but. 
The 90 degree bend I bought from the factory in Wetherill Park, was not 90 but 80 degrees, I saw it as soon as they gave it to me but thought mistakenly that I could make it work. No chance. The section under the roof that is most visible looks wrong. The photo here does not show the defect but it is very visible. 
When I bought the flue, I got to know the owner, and old italian that wanted to do a good deal for me. So he dusted off a few pipes he had from another job. Instead of 8", they were 7" and 3/4" and he got one of the guys to make me the 45 and 90 bend the same size.  
But they did not have a template for that size so he used the one for 8" and so it turned out crooked. 
Back to the factory I took a builders square with me because I remembered last time they were saying that it was ok.  
The owner decided I was right and the he would fix it. First they tried to cut off one of the sections to fix the one I had. Then they decided to make a new one.
The operator that does this job was telling the owner "Boss ... but if I make a new one it will be just like this one". 
I asked him to get me one of the 8" off the shelf and put it on the bench next to my square. It was the same easy 10 degree off. 
 They decided to make a new pattern because obviously they had been using a bad pattern for years. It was probably not as bad as mine but when reducing the diameter by 1/4" the defect became more apparent. 
A 90 bend for a flue is made of 3 sections. I told them you need to make the central section narrower. They said, no we are going to make the side section wider. 
I let them get busy for a while then told them again, the central section needs to be narrower. Eventually they decided to listen to me and got busy modifying the pattern. 
It was like watching the 3 stooges movie.
The owner was trying to trace the pattern to another sheet and pushing and moving it with the marker as he tried. In the end I was holding the pattern and when it came to cut it he cut on the wrong side of the line so had to cut again and after about 5 attempts I finally walked out with a 90 degree elbow. During the whole episode I marveled at how cool this guy was with this display of incompetence from him and his staff. It was all like an interesting hobby he was doing for me.  
I also needed a short piece of the same size so asked him if he could roll me a short pipe about 400 long. He told the operator that does this job to get an offcut 400 wide and roll a pipe "deco" size for me. That is what they call that size. The offcut was 600x400 but he rolled it the wrong way around and came up with a pipe 600 long and 150 in diameter.  :Doh2:  
i have all the parts in the back of the car, ready to put it all back together. But it will not be this weekend. Too risky to drive around in this climate of totalitarian repression. May be next week.

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## Marc

Last but not least was the door. It is not a door with hinges, rather the means to block the heat from escaping the oven when hot, and cook with residual heat, when the oven is used closed, after removing the hot ash and sweeping the floor clean.  
The oven will remain hot for 24 to 48 hours losing temperature slowly providing it is open sparingly to do the cooking. At 400C it is good for 2/3 minutes pizza that is cooked with flames present. A cast iron grill with 4 short legs serves for grilling over the coals. Once swept clean, we can cook bread, roast, stew, curry, cakes and anything else that requires an oven.  
Below pictures of the door. Made from two layer of 3 mm plate separated by 25mm and stuffed with insulating blanket. An absolute overkill that makes the door very heavy. 1.5mm would have been plenty.

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## Bros

What’s the temp gauge measuring?

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## John2b

Fantastic Marc! I'd like to have a pizza oven like yours too. I was going to ask if you could send plans, but to remove the chance of me failing to make one as good as yours, just send the pizzas!

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## Marc

> What’s the temp gauge measuring?

  The sensor is one third up the oven side wall,  one foot from the door opening and sticks out in the oven about 60 mm. The temperature n the oven varies widely according to the distance to the fire and distance from the floor, so when the gauge says 400 C, there are areas closer to the door that are 250 and up in the top of the dome about 500 or more. Short of using a laser gun to measure different locations, it is a good indicator of how the heat is rising. I know that from lighting the fire to when the gauge says 400, it takes 1/2 hour of a good happy fire.   

> Fantastic Marc! I'd like to have a pizza oven like yours too. I was going to ask if you could send plans, but to remove the chance of me failing to make one as good as yours, just send the pizzas!

  
Love to have you for pizzas when you come and visit ...  :Smilie: 
As for plans, best is to buy the book I used. Everything you need is in there.   https://www.bookdepository.com/Your-...UaAmjCEALw_wcB 
You can make a much more pedestrian oven, cheaper and performing just as good, following this book. 
I built a few oven before this, with zero money using second hand house bricks and mud from a creek. I had my daughters stomping the mud and lawn clippings for mortar and render.  My 'door' was a piece of roof sheet I propped with a stick. 
This time I went a bit overboard just because I wanted to.

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## Bros

> The sensor is one third up the oven side wall,  one foot from the door opening and sticks out in the oven about 60 mm. The temperature n the oven varies widely according to the distance to the fire and distance from the floor, so when the gauge says 400 C, there are areas closer to the door that are 250 and up in the top of the dome about 500 or more.

   OK I thought it might have been embedded in the brickwork which after the fire has died down would give you a more realistic temp of the oven

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## Marc

The temperature displayed is the one of the air in the oven at that particular point. THe temperature of the brick wall increases with time as it soaks in the heat. with the fire on, but would most likely be way lower at first until it catches up. The temperature of the brick is not useful to predict cooking temperature. 
After a few hours of fire, and when the oven is swept clean and closed with no more fuel burning, the residual temperature normalises and starts to be uniform. With no more radiating heat from the fire, the residual temperature drops at first and then rises when the door is closed. 
But the above is all anecdotic. Cooking takes place on the oven floor and the pizza or bread cooks in contact with the floor bricks and the ambient temperature and the radiation from the fire. Good light to see the colour changes on the dough and the topping, is much more useful than a gauge or laser gun. 
Sometimes when the cooking gets slower, all I need to do is to pick up the pizza with the peel and lifting it up closer to the dome ... for a few seconds and it's ready.  :Smilie:

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## Bros

When I was a kid a long long time ago we had a baker shop at the end of our street and I used to watch the bakers putting the bread in the oven with very long handled spade thing.

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## Marc

That is called a peel. I made a metal one, but would like to make one out wood now. Much easier to slide the uncooked pizza off into the oven.

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## Bros

> That is called a peel. I made a metal one, but would like to make one out wood now. Much easier to slide the uncooked pizza off into the oven.

  Well there you go I never thought it had a name, they were all wood and had a very long handle

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## r3nov8or

The guy at the traditional pizza shop used to use the peel to check under the pizza base for some well practised and highly considered extent of "cooked". These days it's all just timed conveyor belts... Where's the skill in that!

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## phild01

> These days it's all just timed conveyor belts... Where's the skill in that!

  Had a conveyor belt dominos pizza after many years of not going there, was full of sugar to what I remembered.

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## Gooner

Great thread. These "Go to Whoa" type threads is what got me onto this forum all those years ago. 
Marc, you should change your profile pic to that of you sitting in your pizza oven. Pity its taken over 12K posts to figure out how to post an image in the right orientation.  :Biggrin:   :Hihi:

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## Marc

> The guy at the traditional pizza shop used to use the peel to check under the pizza base for some well practised and highly considered extent of "cooked". These days it's all just timed conveyor belts... Where's the skill in that!

  Yes, you can do everything with a wooden peel, but in my limited experience, there are 3 types of peel and each has a different use. The large and square nose wooden one is best to place the fresh pizza or bread, inside. A bit of semolina on the wood makes the sticky dough slide off no problem. Then a small round metal one is best to turn the pizza around and check for color under the base. A larger round and metal one, will do the extraction and can be used to shovel coals around or take the fire out when required. 
You also need a dedicated mop and bucket with water to wipe the hot floor from ash and dust before cooking. 
I used to buy pizza at a local pizza shop that had a conveyor belt oven. This kind of oven undercooks the base and overcooks the topping. 
One day I came in when the shop was empty so I told the guy if he could cook me one the way I told him to do it. 
He agreed so I said, place the base without topping half way the conveyor belt. Once it comes out, put the topping on the half cooked base and push it up the conveyor belt about one third. He thought I was mad, but the pizza came out perfect.  :Smilie:  
As for the sideways photos, it is a mystery. I take my photos all in landscape mode. Someone else took that one and it is possible it is portrait, however I edited it and turned it the right way, yet once posted it turns sideways every time. It's a curse!  :Rofl5:

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## Marc

One way to build the dome is upside down ...  :Smilie:   
My photo is the right way, yet it comes up this way. Same with some photos that come sideways regardless of how I edit them.
I like it this way ... I remember swearing because i burned my back against the steel roof.  :Smilie:  
In case you wonder how much an oven would weight, according to Forno Bravo, all included it is over 5 tons.

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## John2b

Don't shrug Marc, the world of pizza eaters couldn't bear the consequences!

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## David.Elliott

Many years ago now we went to Sarah Island in Macquarie Harbour in Tassie. An original convict colony where Huon pine was felled and boats were built. In what remains of the settlement there are the ruins of a very large domed oven. The guide stated that it was built by creating a large dome of sand, doing the brickwork and then digging out the sand.  Makes sense, I figured that I could have stood up inside of it when it was complete...

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## Ricey

Great work Marc! 
I am keen to do something similar, probably not as big as yours. Where did you source your insulation and LiteFill Perlite from, and what should I expect to pay for them?

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## dmac

My neighbor has one of these, https://www.elitepizzaovens.com.au/elite-wfpo-home/  It makes pretty nice pizza and is in WA. 
I got keen for a while but it's seems like having yet another large appliance. Instead I purchased a Pizza Steel, nice big lump of 10mm plate. Just bang it into the oven and crank it up for an hour or so. It makes really yum pizza's in about 15 minutes. 
Dave

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## r3nov8or

Yeah, they look cool, but gee, you'd want to love pizza (and/or what ever else they cook well) and use it a lot, for all the space they take up. I bought 2 x pizza stones and use them occasioanlly inside the 6 burner hooded BBQ

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## JB1

Must have missed this thread last year. 
Fantastic oven Marc, well done. 
How you been using it much?  
k

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## davegol

Marc, did you use standard bricks for the inside of the dome or firebricks? 
I've seen most builds use firebricks but they are very expensive. Wondering if that's needed?

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