Sub Hearth and Hearth

The first picture shows the finished beer bottle layer with the hearth extension done in mud. Then I put a 2.5" layer of mud over the whole thing as a sub-hearth. Notice the beer bottle layer is 3" bigger all the way around the baking part of the hearth. This insulating layer will eventually be wrapper around the whole oven. The front part is the future door area and chimney base. The sub-hearth was made with a mud mixture extremely high in fine sand. This is partly due to this is what I had, but also I wanted a very dense layer to absorb and hold heat.

The Hearth is made of fire brick. I got a good deal on some surplus fire brick at fourty-five cents each, but it wasn't enough. So I bought 60 new brick for the hearth and am using the old bricks for the extension/door/chimney base area. The new brick are Whitacre-Greer out of Ohio. We'll see how they perform. The brick are laid up dry on a thin layer of dry sand (for leveling).

At this stage I am also playing around with different chimney/door configurations...