The second day of building started with breakfast with friends, now featuring another helping hand, Paul. We picked him up the night before and resolved to get started again in the morning. The day prior, the base of the oven and the walls were built and left to dry overnight. The photo above shows the oven on the second day, where we picked up again.
The first task was to build up the front of the oven, to make a sort of basin to hold sand. They just used thermal cob for this task, eventually planning on cutting a hole in the front, to remove the sand the next day.
Then came the sand, in many buckets out of the back of John's truck. He had to make two trips for sand, spending less than 250 pesos for quite a lot of sand. The idea is to use it to make a mold. The sands purpose is to support the weight of the top of the oven while it dries.
Here you can see the basin is mostly filled, but it still doesn't quite look like an oven.
Once filled, John used his hands to shape two humps.
The one on the left would be where the chimney pipe comes out of, wheras the chamber on the right is the intended baking chamber.
There goes more thermal cob, starting in the low points.
When the mound is slightly covered, the pipe was inserted into the sand in the top. We cobbed around that to make it sturdy.
The front still had some bare brick facing, so John got to work covering that in a good layer of cob.
A few more layers were added and the oven was considered done, or as done as it could be. The last several cob layers were structural cob, meaning it contained plant fibers to make it a little sturdier. This is generally the type of cob houses are built out of.
All that's left is to let it dry some. After awhile, preferably a couple of days if you can spare them, it's time to empty the stove.
I'll save that for next time, as the next morning was its own quarky adventure. For here I leave off. Soon I'll post the photo rich posts as promised, where you can pretty much see the stove built step by step, sometimes frame by frame.
And watch out Steemit, we've upgraded our photo-taking game. With an investment and loan from a friend, we've purchased a Nikon D3300 camera, allowing us to take MUCH better photos. So when you notice a drastic photo quality increase, that's why!
I'll end this by clarifying, I didn't do most of the work on the oven. That credit really goes to John, @modprobe and our friend Paul. Realistically, this second day, I just mixed a few batches of cob and kept them fed. So thank you guys!
Thanks for reading and supporting us, until next time!