Weekend 2 : The birth of the new Cassius Clay

tealights to start drying out the inside

Saturday
First job on the list was to remove the sand. Unfortunately my arm only reached halfway back into the oven, so after filling 8 bags with ballast I had to wait for the mighty Flee to turn up with his super long arms.
Of course the bags of ballast all then had to be sieved again to remove the stones as we needed the sand for the next set of sausages. The fire pit lid once again became the perfect sieve.
After Flee and Tracey left about 5pm, I lit some tea lights inside the oven to help start the drying process now that the sand was out and no longer holding in the moisture. A slight crack had appeared on the inside above the door opening, but nothing serious. The front had sunken in on itself slightly - like it had been leant on, so I put the log back in to hold it up which of course starved the candles of oxygen. There was nothing to do except wait until morning.
Tracey returned at 11:30pm and found me fast asleep by the fire! the crack had got a fair bit bigger, so we polished off a few glasses of the red stuff and retired to bed - me in my hammock in its' new location and Tracey on a camp-bed in front of the fire. Nothing to do in the dark but sleep.

Sunday
I slept brilliantly and woke at 9am to the sun shining in my face. Tracey didn't sleep quite so well fireside as the sun hits there much earlier and was pretty hot from the start.
We started by making a repair to the crack in the front and agreed to let it dry for 4 hours with the log in situ and the sun on it before attempting to light a proper fire in it for the first time. It didn't appear to be drying out much at all.

frying pan coal fire

Ant arrived mid-morning to join our little band of clay-makers, and we spent the day, puddling, pounding, digging and sculpting. I added more of a worktop around the oven as I will need something to stand on to build it as the thing grows in size with more layers. I also clad the hurdle wall behind it with clay because that will actually form part of the oven too when we get to the final layer.
At 2pm we lit a small fire inside the oven on a cast iron frying pan so we could slide it in and out easily and kept it topped up with wood and coal until we left soon after 5pm - shattered. Before leaving though we did name the oven "Cassius". He will hopefully survive the night and dry out some more before out next visit.

As it stands at the end of weekend 2, we have;

• 4 sausages ready to build with
• 3 buckets of clay ready to puddle into sausages
• 1 trug of slip ready to make the insulation layer (our trial of 1 jug of slip to 4 jugs of sawdust seemed to be workable)

We think we need 16 sausages in total at least to finish, so next weekend we hope to complete another 6 sausages as well as get the chimney and entrance built. With any luck the oven will have fully dried out by then and so it shouldn't be too difficult, (famous last words!).