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Wednesday, October 9, 2013

the dome ... part 2

phew ! .. the dome left today at around 5:00 ... a challenging project if ever there was one, and we plan to help set it up for the new oven on site tomorrow or friday.  watta project !!  here's a link to the previous post on the early stages of construction ... ignorance breeds confidence ...we had no idea what we were getting into.
in this photo, you can see pete, the mason brother in law, of vermont brick ovens, on the left, and trevor, admiring the collapsing mechanism.  if you enlarge the photo, (click it),  there's a handwheel on the vertical stem, and when you turn it, the 'hub' drops and the ribs can be removed one at a time through the oven door, or more likely from the collapsed pile of parts.
when he's ready, we'll be helping pete set it up for his current project.  he's currently working on the soldier course that stands vertically around the 72" diameter .. here's a photo of that in the works.
in case you missed the first post, it'll look like this when it's done.
well, it was quite a trip getting this project together .. lots of head scratching, lots of glue, (over a gallon) and some sanding and bondoing ... here are some more photos of the process ...
 early on, with the 'glue up form' still in use .. see this link for other early photos
 here we're getting the shim blocks (later knocked out to collapse the form) figured out ... 
in the end, we made two different versions ..
 sanding and fitting the rough glued pieces .. it ain't perfect, but there aren't any 
cracks that a half a brick can fall through ...

tah dah .. on to bondo and paint
the holes were from the ten thousand screws we used to make the five layers of bending plywood do what they had absolutely no interest in doing, which is form part of a sphere.
 a previous vermont brick oven project  in manchester, for which we made a different form 
that was a lot more complex and time consuming to set up than this one ..
we realized as we were packing it up .. damn! we missed our chance.  we shoulda painted 
the north pole, hudson bay, and sweden to alaska on it ...
 i will NOT be going into the wood globe business ..... all for now. 

 

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