Its been a couple of weeks since I had the opportunity to do any further work on the wood fired oven. After rushing to get the oven ready for our daughters birthday, it's now time to correct the bits that I did not have the material to do correctly the first time. It is desirable that the oven is as air tight and possible when the doors and damper is shut, but the junction between the rear wall and arch is a problem, the arch expands much more than the wall and it is therefore not possible to tie the two together rigidly. This is all a bit of an experiment, but the approach I have chosen to try, is to leave an expansion gap of about 6 mm which is the blocked with a refractory gasket material.
To create the expansion gap, 3 courses of bricks have been removed from the rear wall. This was a good opportunity to take a picture of the back of the reducer arch.
I don't think this gasket materiel will completely seal the oven, but the gap should help maintain the integrity of the brickwork and the gasket will keep some of the smoke / gasses and steam from escaping.
Now this is complete, the mortar will have to be left to dry for a few days and then curing fires will be started again to drive out any remaining moisture before the oven can be used again for baking. This should give me time to build to exterior cover that will hold all the insulation.
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