Cassius has been drying out all week, aided by small fires every night in the form of disposable BBQs. Easy to get going and easy to pull in and out when it looks like the fire is being starved of oxygen.The drier Cassius got, the easier it was to keep the fire going. At times it was too hot to hold a hand on the top of the clay and so we know it will work well as an oven once it's all done. Worryingly though, there was smoke also escaping from cracks all the way round as the last lower 6 inches dried out. We have since filled them with fire cement and also raised the opening an inch or so to meet the level of the smoke ceiling in the oven. We don't want to start on the next layer (the flammable layer!) until we are 100% certain no more cracks will form and the existing crack repairs are solid.
This expected setback didn't stop us of course and we spent the weekend building the entrance way and continuing with the sausage-making in preparation for the third layer when we get there.
We are on schedule at the minute with 7 sausages ready, 7 buckets waiting to be puddled and a trug full of slip, We still need 2 more buckets of clay, 9 sausages and another trug of slip but the end of the prep is in sight and it should get easier from here on in.... although having said that we have done some calculations to work out roughly how many bricks we need for each of the next stages and it's going to take a while! We think 200 bricks of insulating material and 550 bricks for the final clay layer. We don't yet know how many bricks per sausage so it's all still a bit of a guess... but the oven is currently 106cms in diameter, if all goes to plan with the rest of the build, Cassius will be 140cms wide when finished, which is quite large!
The brick entrance arch/tunnel wasn't quite as easy as I thought it would be, but thankfully I was alone during the build and so no-one had to suffer my foul-mouthed-headless-chicken impression. It took about an hour, an entire sausage, a terracotta flower pot and half a bag of sand (as well as the log template of course) to complete. The sheer size of it has actually made the oven dome itself look tiny all of sudden, but I know it will swing back the other way when the final layers are on. Now starts the drying out process yet again and with fingers crossed I am off to Wales for a couple of days, so we shall see how successful it's been when I get back and remove the log template currently holding it up.
