Roof building

Now comes the technical part - putting together the framework to enclose the pizza oven! This couldn,t have been done without the expertise of Simon, who supplied the oak timber and worked out the pattern for joining it altogether, although it did cause a lot of head scratching for both of us. This all took place from the beginning of the summer with Simon coming down in the evening and laying things out and leaving me the homework of cutting out the joints. All the joints have to be scribed as there are no square faces to mark off: lines have to be drawn on the timber to get reference points. Basically the frame is laid out on a horizontal plane on trestles with everthing being levelled up and then marked and cut. The joints are all mortise and tenon - the tenons being not so bad to cut out, but the mortises requiring a lot more time and effort. To facilitate matters I made 2 bigger mallets to make things alittle easier. There is alot of banging bits together and then taking them apart until finally a good joint is made. This quite naturally took a while, most of the work being done in the lighter evenings and always being accompanied by a beer or two!
Eventually all the joints were done and the moment had come to raise the framework into position. This was the time to see whether all our endeavour had been in vain! Iniatally we thought it might require more than two of us to raise the frame, but one evening we decided to just go for it, and hey presto, it all clicked into place much to our relief and surprise!
Amost there now, just had to locate some tiles. After a weekend at my sisters, I discovered that my brother-in-law had some left over from a previous project so my problem was solved. Then it was just putting on the lathes and laying the tiles. I had to increase the height of the chimney as the frame was a little bigger than we had originally anticipated and the chimney wouldn't have gone through the roof. Simon had a piece of chimney lining which fortuitously dropped into the tomato can: it was as simple as that! As yet I haven't covered the lining with clay but I might get around to it sometime. Once it was all completed it was time to stand back and admire the whole thing. What started out as I thought would be just a pizza oven was now an eyecatching piece of work of some substance. All the hard work put in by various people is much appreciated and all the bits and pieces that I have aquired has made the whole project incredibly satisyfying. Of course the proof of it all is in the food that has been cooked in the oven, all of which has been eaten and praised by those that have tasted it. Obviously I am biased but to date there have been no major disasters and I am learning more about how to use it and how to control the temperature. There is now a dampener on the chimney which means it can be closed off once the fire has finished and this means that less heat escapes up the chimney. Also when it is closed whilst the fire is still burning I can throw on damp wood chips and this creates a superb way to smoke a variety of food.