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How to make an outdoor oven with your own hands

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The long-awaited spring is coming, the heating season is already ending. In the village, more and more often they heat a wood-burning stove through the summer passage, and then only in order to cook dinner. A little more and it will be completely impossible to use the stove in the house – it’s hot. Many villagers and summer residents transfer their economic and culinary activities to summer kitchens, and the most cunning and “advanced” ones – to the street.

How to make an outdoor oven with your own hands

What do we want from the oven

The construction of a street hearth solves many simple routine tasks that seem incomprehensible and irrelevant to a city person from the outside. With the help of an open-air oven, you can do everything: cook food for yourself and your pets, do canning, bake bread and dry mushrooms, quickly heat up the water and, in the end, just burn some garbage, old branches.

There is a great variety of options for garden and outdoor hearths – these are barbecues and barbecues, fireplaces and analogs of potbelly stoves, tandoors and smokehouses, cauldron ovens and cooking stoves. They all have their own purpose and their own characteristics..

Next, we will focus on the brick cooking oven, as the most versatile. It is clear that it should be practical and functional, safe and durable, compact and fast-assembled, and with all this – also budget.

Where to begin

It is best if, before starting any work, you draw up a detailed drawing (order) with the exact location of each structural element, you will first develop an action plan. Decide on the location, design, purpose, size of the oven. In fact, such a painstaking approach will save you time and help you calculate the exact amount of required building material..

To erect a furnace, ideally, you need to use a new heat-resistant brick, without damage, with clear geometric dimensions. This allows for laying with a minimum layer of clay mortar, which is an important unwritten rule of a “seasoned” stove-maker. To save money, of course, you can use used bricks, but always clean, even and certainly fireproof.

One of the most important issues that needs to be addressed is the preparation of the correct solution. The main thing is that it is not very greasy, but moderately plastic. Excessively greasy solution cracks upon drying, lean solution lacks strength.

Much depends on the characteristics of the clay available to you. There is one that is suitable for masonry without filler, while greasy clays are mixed with sand (preferably not river sand) in various proportions (most often 1: 1, 1: 1.5, 1: 2).

There are many ways to check the characteristics of a solution, the simplest is to prepare samples of different proportions, mold balls from them and throw them on the floor from a height of 1 meter, if the ball crumbles or cracks appear on it, then the solution contains too much sand. Experiment by changing the percentage of filler, the golden mean is sure to be found.

The clay must be soaked in advance (2-3 days) in a suitable container, then, gradually adding sand, knead it, with your feet or tamping, so that no lumps remain, and the solution becomes homogeneous. Be sure to feel it with your hands for the presence of unnecessary impurities, clots, stones.

Experienced stove-makers recommend sifting or grinding all the ingredients and the finished mixture through a sieve. Do not hesitate, you will make up for this time when laying, especially since only about three buckets of mortar are needed for a hundred bricks.

In building supermarkets, you can buy ready-made dry mixes for laying ovens. Convenient, but expensive – it will not work (we have a budget option).

How to find a suitable place for your stove

Our oven is very compact, it only takes up 0.5 m22, but it is necessary to correctly determine the place of its laying so that the chimney is at a sufficient distance from wooden floors, enclosing structures, roof elements, and there is no furniture, household appliances and other items near the firebox. Convenient access is required both directly to the slab and to the “kick brick” behind the oven. It’s good if there is a canopy above the stove so that the rains do not wash away the masonry.

How to make an outdoor oven with your own hands

Due to the small size and, accordingly, the weight, the foundation in the usual sense can not be arranged, it is enough to limit yourself to the organization of a cushion of rubble (50 – 100 mm) and sand filling (10 – 30 mm). The main purpose of the pillow is to level the base and evenly distribute the loads. For waterproofing the bottom row of bricks, before laying, it is necessary to put a sheet of roofing material, polyethylene or other material with similar properties of an appropriate size.

We start laying

The first rows are the basis of the oven, there can be from 2 to 5 of them, depending on how comfortable you want to raise the work plane. Since we will use a factory stove with two burners (450 – 750 mm), the appropriate dimensions of the structure are 500 X 1000 mm – these are 16 bricks laid flat.

Each element of the new row of the base must bind the bricks of the previous one. Be sure to check the horizontal, verticality of the masonry using a building level. Squareness is determined by comparing the length of the diagonals (they must be equal).

And again, we note that the golden rule of the stove-maker is that the thinner the layer of mortar, the better the masonry (the optimal thickness is 3-4 mm). If the seams are too thick, the clay in them can crack and spill out, which inevitably leads to uncontrolled infiltration of cold air (deterioration of traction, excessive consumption of firewood …).

How to arrange and block a blower

Having raised the base, a pit (blower) is formed, designed to extract ash and provide oxygen to the furnace from below. Its height is equal to two rows of bricks laid flat (about 150 mm), depth – 400 mm (approximately along the length of the grate), we make the side walls half a brick thick. We cover this well with two steel corners 500 mm long (oven width) with shelves inward.

How to make an outdoor oven with your own hands Overlapping the blower with corners

If you use factory cast iron grates or a grate, the distance between the corners should be taken with a margin of at least 10 mm for the convenience of replacing burnt-out elements and preventing damage due to metal expansion during heating. For the same purpose, parts of the corners, walled up in masonry, are wrapped in asbestos.

To save money, you can assemble the lattice from ordinary steel reinforcement, rods, corners. Burning temperatures of wood in an outdoor stove allow this.

How to equip a firebox and what is a smoke chamber

The width of the furnace is limited by the thickness of the walls (half-brick) and is 270 mm. We take a height of about 200 mm – this is 3 rows. It provides good heating of the plate. A larger volume of the furnace is intended for heating, when a large load of wood is needed, or for a water circuit.

At the level of the grate location in the rear wall of the furnace, an untied “kick brick” (half a brick on the edge) should be placed, designed to facilitate access to the inner space of the smoke chamber (soot extraction).

We cover the front part of the firebox with a corner, and behind, for installing the pipe, with a metal strip at a distance of 120-130 mm, so that the pipe with a diameter of 150 mm rests on the brick of the rear wall and this mortgage.

In the depth of the fuel chamber, at a distance of 500 mm from the front edge, a smoke threshold (tooth, jib) is placed, made of two bricks (again flat), not tied to the walls. Its purpose is to increase thrust by narrowing the hot gas passage. It divides the well, consisting of 3 rows of bricks, into a firebox and a smoke chamber (hailo), on which a pipe is mounted on top. Moreover, in our case, the small burner located above the tooth heats up very well..

How to make an outdoor oven with your own hands A brick is visible lying flat – this is a smoke threshold

How to mount the stove

Before installing the cast-iron plate, you need to wrap its circuit with a moistened asbestos cord, make a sealing cushion of asbestos. It is not recommended to lay metal directly on clay, due to the different expansion during heating, cracks may appear.

How to make an outdoor oven with your own hands The stove covers the entire top of the oven

Instead of an expensive cast-iron stove with burners (for lack of used options), you can use a suitable steel sheet with a thickness of more than 5 mm.

Features of pipe installation

We make the chimney from a galvanized pipe installed on the back wall and a metal strip with a diameter of 150 mm and a height of 3 meters. We insulate the junction of the chimney to the stone base with wet asbestos, lay it in with a brick, lightly plaster it. Fix the top of the pipe with diagonal spacers made of CD-profile.

We put on a deflector (cap, fungus) on the head of the chimney. It provides protection against rainwater entering the stove and against gusts of wind that knock down the smoke stream.

How to make an outdoor oven with your own hands The chimney is detached from the roof

It often makes sense to install a spark arrestor on the pipe – a wire mesh with a fine mesh.

In places close to the location of the chimney with wooden structures, it is necessary to use thermal insulating gaskets made of sheet asbestos.

Using a grinder at a height of 2 meters in a metal pipe, we make a slot for installing a valve (gate). It serves to regulate the furnace draft by closing the smoke channel..

There are stainless steel pipes on sale that are specially designed for chimney installations. They are durable and have a beautiful appearance, but the price for them “bites” a little.

Conclusion

Here, in fact, a budget outdoor oven is ready. As you have noticed, doors were not used in its design either for the firebox or for the blower. Instead, a thin metal flap was used to cover the entire front of the oven. The holes drilled in it are designed to allow air to enter the combustion chamber.

How to make an outdoor oven with your own hands

This design allows, by removing the grates, to increase the firebox, to use the stove as a brazier or fireplace.

Now, of course, I really want to quickly test it in action. However, one should not rush, depending on the humidity and temperature of the air, the masonry should dry out within several days. In the meantime, you can light up a newspaper and a few thin twigs, enjoy the result of your work. Rest assured she was not in vain.

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Comments: 2
  1. Rhiannon

    Could you please provide a detailed step-by-step guide on how to build an outdoor oven from scratch? Specifically, what materials and tools would be required, and any important safety considerations or tips to keep in mind during the construction process?

    Reply
  2. Riley Campbell

    Can anyone share a step-by-step guide or recommendations on how to construct a homemade outdoor oven? I’ve always wanted to have one in my backyard for outdoor cooking and baking. Any advice on the materials needed, design ideas, and specific techniques would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance for your help!

    Reply
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