3pm one summer day we arrived in Manakau to start building an outdoor earth pizza oven. Si starts by removing the existing BBQ, leveling off the dirt floor and putting a framing of bricks around the outside of the area.
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Pumice collected from the beach is used as insulation . Regula checks to see if it's level. We got about 6 shopping bags of pumice for the project and used it all.
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Sand is poured over the pumice to make a flat bed for the fire bricks to sit in. We got about 10 bags of sand (shopping bags that is). Luckily Rosalie had a rental car for the weekend :-)
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Si and Regula pat the sand nice and flat, and we are almost done for today. The book we had said that they had built the whole oven in one day - all we can say is they must have longer days!
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Yay the base is completed. A base of fire bricks is used, and next to it the spare bricks and sand are worked to make a flatish area for putting hot stuff.
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Skip ahead a week, and Rosalie has already got the basic structure well underway. You can do this with a pile of sand in the middle, but as she is a professional potter, she is using the coil method of pot making (so we didn't have to carry so much sand!)
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To start the next coil (see the sausages down to the left), she roughs up the ends a bit with a scraper, and dampens it down with a sponge. Thats so that the two layers stick properly.
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The clay coil is worked onto the existing layer. The clay is a mixture of old scrap clay rosalie had laying around, and has some river sand in it also.
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To make it nice and smooth inside and out, rosalie stands in the middle and hits the clay with a paddle
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