Baker's fieldguide to oven building. Part 1

The first step was to dig a proper foundation.

Concrete footings and 8 inch blocks are laid up to form the base.

There needs to be plenty of ledge room to lay stones around the block structure. 

Meanwhile work is done figuring out the span dimensions and angles for the opening.

The vault of the bake oven chamber needs to be 17 bricks across and 5 bricks deep.

Every firebrick is then cut at the proper angle.

Three inches of concrete is poured inside a wooden frame on a prepared base of plywood and rebar.

The herring bone hearth is then laid with refractory cement on the cured concrete platform .

The joints are tight and the surface perfectly level.

The stonework is starting to be laid.

The joints are recessed to give a dry laid look. 

Ready aim fire.

Photos of people taking photos always seem to attract interest. Even if the subject matter is dull it draws you in because the fact that someone is photographing it makes you wonder if there's something you're missing.  I didn't know my photo was being taken as I stooped down to get a close-up of the first fire in our new bake oven we just built in California. It did seem pretty special. It worked well (the smoke rose up the chimney effortlessly, none of it came out the door) and the proportions all worked well visually. The first burn in it was very exciting. So in a way this could have  been a photo which didn't need to include me in it taking a photo of it.

Bake oven designing

Thinking with my hands sometimes starts with a drawing.  Sometimes it starts with a design on paper or even a napkin, but in the case of this bake oven project we were asked to design the ideas flowed from experimenting doing a drawing first on sketchup. 

Heritage masonry professor John Scott and I worked out some of the details based on our collective experience working on well proportioned stone buildings and knowing that bake ovens can and should look beautiful too. They don't have to look as utilitarian as they often do. Our aim was not to just build a good working oven but to wow people too when they see it. 

Here is the design we came up with. We decided to give it the proportions of a small house and have two parapets, one of which the bake oven chimney was housed. 

We have already changed a few things from this original design as we have had the opportunity to work out some of the design as we build. I'm hoping it will make an interesting post later this week to compare the finished structure to this drawing. 

Cracked dry hands

Been working with cement all this week doing mortared stonework . We are building a bake oven. We are using cement because we don't want there to be holes between the stones and we want the bricks to stick. It is the lime in the mix that makes is very causticky too. It's making my hands and skin very dry. Puts new meaning to being a 'dry' stone waller. 

When i look at my hands I see lots of tiny cracks. They kind of make an interesting pattern. When I magnify them thousands of times there appears to be millions of tiny little hands in a complex never ending fractal pattern. If I look closer, all those tiny hands are dry and cracked too.

Wild Rock Wine Shelf

Abbey Road

The cobbled pitching of the greenhouse floor looks best when it is viewed from high atop the cherry picker.

Waiting to happen.

I am thankful to have had the opportunity to work with some great people last week completing this dry stone wall structure.  The Gothic arch pyramid greenhouse was a design I had come up with a long time before it ever was realized. Our client saw it last year and gave us a wonderful opportunity to build it and provided a beautiful space to build it in. 
It is not often one gets to create something so iconic. 
Not appearing to be reminiscent of anyone else's work or at all derivative of any other specific structure, this unique dual-gabled folly with its diagonally laid stonework looks so convincingly 'right' that it gives the impression of being 'inevitable'. I can't help but think it was merely waiting to be revealed. Thanks to Sean Adcock, Dave Claman, Sean Smyth, Akira Inman and Evan Oxland for helping make it happen.

Then the rain came.

Immediately after we completed the second wall of the dry stone greenhouse near Mendocino Ca. the rain came.

We put an 18 foot 2 x 8 board across the peeks and draped a 60' by 20' clear plastic tarp over our work space to stay dry, and began pitching the floor with a mixed pallet of tumbled bricks, granite columns, flag stones and red sandstone sticks. 

Our design was based on dividing the floor into four sections and maintaining a symmetry with our materials and out cobbling pattern. The end result was visually stunning which totally surprised us.  Pictures of the finished walls and floor will be posted here tomorrow.

A wall is some of the part of the holes.

We completed the two day Redwood City workshop last Sunday at Lyngso Garden Materials. Sean Adcock, John Scott and I instructed a large group of enthusiastic students showing them how to build a free-standing wall using this rather wavy, not-as-flat-as-it-looks material known as Cold Water Canyon Stone that is found locally in California.

The new 40 foot section of wall, which included a wooden garden gate entrance way (framed with two authentic limestone fence posts imported from Kansas) was completed well on time and looked quite beautiful yesterday in the morning sunlight, when we took some more pictures.

It occurs to me that though there are things about the finished wall that could be improved on and there were holes in one or two places where you could see through, the wall we built as a group consists of more than just stones. It is the spaces too. The places where people stop and chat and get to know each other, the pauses when you think 'wow', this is so great to be working with stone, and the gaps in time and space when you are lost in the wonder and satisfaction that comes with building something with your hands.

I read a quote today online about some very early native American walls.

"The native Americans of Martha’s Vineyard say that they built the stone rows with openings between the rocks so that the wind could blow through. They are referring to one of the many images of the breath of life. The stones must breathe, the animals must breathe and the plants must breathe. This unification of the spirit and the flesh is at the core of native American harmony of thought and feeling and makes the stone rows sacred." --James Mavor, from his booklet A Line of Stones to the Sun  Celebrating the Ceremonial Stone Landscapes of Eastern North America

Dry Stone Magic

We keep telling students that walling is simple physics and common sense and then John Scott goes and does something like this. Sheesh!

Stretching exercises.

At the dry stone walling workshop in Redwood City yesterday students were taught the importance of warming up and stretching before attempting to move a lot of rocks all day. John Scott showed us an exercise that helped loosen up the back muscles and enable people to stay flexible. 

Throughstones are added every four feet along the wall at knee height.

In just the same way way stone walls are built to be able to yield to different natural forces, people need to ensure that their joints can flex and move during periods of stress.

Photos of walling progress

 Here are some shots from two weeks ago of the progress we were making on the Gothic greenhouse before the California rains came.

Remembering how it all comes together.

It was one year and one week ago today that we began assembling an unusual pyramid shaped structure that I had designed two years previously involving two triangular dry stone walls with stones laid 'on the bias' and leaning diagonally away from two  Gothic arches

Sean Adcock was invited to join us back then too to assist with many of the measurements and the setting up the guide poles and string lines as well as helping in the first week of construction. The two larger boxy red sandstone bases at the ends of the triangle had to be set in the earth at a forty-five degree angle in order to lay all our slanted stones on.

David Claman was also there that year working hard and seeing to it that the original north wall was completed over the two weeks we were there in California.


David and Sean joined me this year again to build the second wall and create the cobble-pitched inner courtyard area.

Stone Pillows

 Robert Milhollin came by yesterday to install the two limestone pillows he sculpted for a dry stone bench on the property. Robert is a full time sculptor in the Mendocino area and a good friend of John Fishers another excellent sculptor who I wrote about last year in an earlier post. Hands of Stone

 

To put the finishing touch on the pillows and give them a darker hue and water resistant luster, Robert painted the pillows with a 50:50 solution of boiled linseed oil and paint thinner.

Then I helped carry one of the soft, light-looking pillows down the path to the bench. 

In their new setting they seem almost comfortable enough to recline against. The clever thing about pillows (and walls) is they will last much longer when they are made out of stone.

You might like to check out Roberts website.

www.mendocinosculpture.com/

Concentration

Working with real stone all day building dry stone walls you'd think we'd know the real thing when we see it. Last night we went out to dinner at a friends house in Sea Ranch and stared at a fireplace discussing whether the stone was fake. We kept looking for clues , concentrating on the pattern, tapping the material, looking at the inside surfaces and studying for phony looking pieces. It was fairly well done work and there was no evidence of any duplicate shaped pieces. In the end I spotted it. Can you see the pair?

Crevice Gardens

Crevice gardens are a variant of the rock garden.  I don't know a lot about them but I do know they look beautiful. 

They are literally vertical rock gardens and often mimic the look (and accommodate the flora) of naturally fissured and cracked bedrock outcroppings. Flagstone sandstone and limestone (or split layered granite) is bedded on edge at least two feet deep buried in and back filled with sandy loam or pit run.  The rock edge faces are set flush to the ground and placed in groupings to create narrow crevices and veins of soil. Crevice plants don't thrive in good soil. There are many dwarf cushion plants that prefer this environment, including some of the most beautiful alpines. Sedum is also very fond of this type of dry rocky terrain.

Apparently cracks and crevices in cliffs and mountain peaks give protection to many plant species. Alpine plants grow happily in sun warmed natural crevice gardens in a summer that may last only a few weeks. The solar heat absorbed by the stone adds a few extra days to the growing season as well.

A crevice garden can be a great alternative solution to a typical stone retaining wall for accommodating the change in grades of a hilly garden while also providing an environment for some more unusual species of hardy plants. Just remember to plant things that don't need much water, grow slowly and stay small. You don't want to hide the stonework.

After all, a crevice garden is basically a dry stone wall laying on its side, buried flush to the ground.

Big Flags

Big flagstones weighing over several hundred pounds can be moved by one person, even up hill, in the rain and mud. I had the opportunity to do some of this kind of grunt work yesterday as there was no machine operator available. The heavy 'square-ish' chunks of  flag move surprisingly easy while long rectangles and huge triangles are almost impossible to roll alone. I brought up this one for setting in the courtyard area of the dry stone greenhouse. The more easily moved square and roundish shapes could take on a more dominant role in the floor design if it depended on just me getting the flagstone to where it was needed.

Feature Article

Nice article written by freelance writer and photographer Liz Szekeres  (eszekeres53@gmail.com 416 220 5278 ) recently wrote about the old dry stone walls in the Caledon area as well as the walls we built at our very successful DSWAC Rocktoberfest held there in 2011 

The quarterly journal is called..

Sideroads