Building the roof

The most stressful part of building the oven was the roof, considering it would consist of around 1500 kg of brick and clay. First I cut an arch out of 3 boards, placed them level in the oven and then loosely packed timber planks over them to form the arch. The timber wasn’t nailed down, because it had to be removed once the roof was finished and the clay had set. I used a cement lintel in the chimney, although a clay arch would have been more attractive, but it would have made the oven smaller, a practical decision. Again I kept the bricks wet and started building the roof. I made sure the bricks were as close to each other as possible and I filled up all gapes between the bricks with clay.

Once the roof was done I finished it off  with clay, tomorrow I will do the chimney. I kept the oven wet by spaying it with water, the idea is to get the oven uniformly wet so that when I start drying the oven it would dry evenly, I could imagine cracking to be a clay ovens biggest problem.