Build Your Own Pizza Oven
Suppose you were inspired by the cheap DIY home pizza oven—but weren't so sure your home insurance would cover oven modifications. It's time to build a safer, more eye-pleasing oven, and we've got a thorough guide.Lots of people can say "Yeah I like pizza!" but Lifehacker reader Kevin Lester can say, "I like pizza enough to build an awesome pizza oven to make sure it'd be done just right." Technically not a direct quote, but it's safe to say the man likes pizza. He combined his love of a good pizza and a challenging project into a pizza oven that's both functional and pleasing to the eye.
The oven you see in the photo here is his fourth oven, he's been building and refining pizza ovens for quite a few summers now. His first oven was built shortly after he got married. He wanted to build an oven, but it wasn't in the budget to go buy all sorts of specialty materials like fire bricks, concrete forms, and special heat-resistant cement. He found a building site with a bunch of cast-off bricks and, with permission from the building manager, scavenged enough bricks to build the first oven. Despite some first-attempt lumps and bumps, that oven got tons of use. From that oven he learned three important things: it needed a bigger inner diameter, he needed a better mold than packed earth (too lumpy and difficult to form), and despite concern that it might not hold up to repeated use, the basic clay bricks and Portland cement held up perfectly. The original oven was built almost 20 years ago, and is still in service.
He built a new pizza oven each time they moved, using it as a chance to refine his technique. As you can see from the photo above, his latest version is definitely not a lumpy affair but quite symmetrical and pleasing. The description he emailed us of the build process is quite thorough and for those of you looking to DIY, quite a valuable guide. Here is what he had to say about the current build:
When it came time to build the fourth oven I knew exactly what to do, but I had a restriction that I haven't had before. I now have very little room in the garden for a large oven and I'm not sure just where the most practical place is to build it. I couldn't decide whether to build it in our semi-indoors entertainment area or outside. Size would also have to be considered. I eventually decided that it needs to be mobile.
I decided to built it on a sturdy steel frame that could have wheels fitted at some stage. I cast a reinforced concrete slab as a base and I constructed a sturdy steel frame to hold the slab up like a table top. I used 40 mm clay brick pavers again as a oven floor, but this time I've used a mixture of Portland cement and perlite in a layer under the paving bricks. I reason for the perlite was to provide better insulation to my portable concrete slab, time will tell whether this is the right decision, gravel would probably have given better mass to the floor?
I used cardboard from our moving boxes to cut the 1/4 round shapes to support the dome during construction. The internal diameter on this fourth oven is smaller than ideal, I've gone for 1 m, but with the oven being mobile I wanted to keep the size and weight down to a minimum practical size. The cardboard shapes worked perfectly again to form the dome shape. They were even easier to cut (I just needed a Stanley knife and steady hand) than the ceiling board I'd previously used and they were very easy to pull out after construction.
The dome shape has turned out very nicely. The cardboard was quite sturdy, about 5 mm thick, and showed no signs of struggling to hold the weight of the bricks for the dome during construction. I found that the cardboard worked even better than the ceiling board, it had some 'give' in it if the brick needed to be adjusted inwardly a little, just a little tap on the brick with the back of the trowel and the cardboard gave way slightly and allowed perfect alignment of bricks.
Aside from the slight compromise on the size of the oven everything was perfect and he ended up with his best constructed oven yet.
