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Let me start out by saying that I LOVE pizza. I could eat pizza every day. The thing about pizza is you can't really make a good one at home in the oven as most residential ovens only go up to 500 deg F. You need at least 600 for good pizza cook, preferably even higher.
So I've had this idea bouncing around in my head for around 4 or 5 years now. I've always had other time and money priorities so I've just put off trying to make this because of it. Well about a week ago I decided enough time had passed thinking about it and it was time to make it happen. I've gone through probably 10 to 15 different designs in my head over the years of how I wanted this to be and figured I'd use that as my guide and just start sticking metal together and see what happens. I've always found rocket stoves to be pretty interesting but never really had a good reason to build one. They burn really hot and clean and that got me thinking that a rocket stove would make the perfect basis for a pizza oven. Plus they are super simple to make. So last week I picked up some steel to get going. And the sticker shock is real, steel has gotten very expensive.
Anyway, I started with the rocket stove portion first. I made it tall enough so that the oven portion would be around waist high so I wasn't bending over all the time to check it. Got it all together and took it for a test run to see how it performed.
The test went well but I discovered a design flaw after running it. When I put it together I put some expanded steel under the combustion chamber to catch hot coals to keep the fire burning hot. Well I used 1/2 inch and it was too small and nothing was dropping through as it burned down blocking off air flow. So I had to cut it back open, cut out the expanded metal and weld in a couple of 1/4 inch rods in it's place. Should work better at catching coals while allowing them to drop down as they burn smaller.
Got it welded back together and started building the frame out of inch square tubing and mounted the rocket stove to it so I could build the rest of it out.
I built a square out of 1/2 inch angle for the pizza stone and mounted it to the frame. Notice that the frame is perfectly square and flat, it's the oven frame that's out of square. Oops!
Added some plate to the rear around the exhaust to seal off the rear bottom of the cook chamber.
This is where the pizza stone sits.
The area under the pizza stone is open to the outside and I got thinking that I'm going to probably lose a lot of heat from the bottom of the stone so I added a piece of plate to the underside and fully welded all sides leaving a 1 inch air gap underneath it. If that's still not enough I can always add a piece of 1 inch rock wool insulation to retain even more heat if needed.
I cut a piece of sheet for the top and ended up taking it to a local fab shop and had them bend it into the shape I needed. It cost me $15 and saved me a bunch of time as my only other option would have been to cut and weld each section. It actually turned out looking a lot nicer too.
I got thinking that I needed a stop of some sorts in case I miss the mark with the peel to prevent shoving a pizza to the rear over the exhaust blast and burning the crap out of it so I added a small piece of flat to the rear of the pizza stone tray.
Now came the time to close off the rear of the cook chamber. This proved to be very tedious for my simple brain to process. Ended up taking me about 3 hours to cut, trim, fit, cut some more and then finally tack them all in place. Geometry is hard.
The last piece of the puzzle was adding a lip to the front to help hold some of the heat in the top.
Last step was to get all of the tacked in pieces welded in. Don't look too closely at my welds, I'm not a welder. I can stick metal together but I would never call myself a welder or fabricator.
And the finished product. Well almost. I still need to test it out and see if it's even going to work like I want and I'm going to paint it with some BBQ paint to make it look better and help hide some of my ugly welds. :-[
Thanks for looking.
So I've had this idea bouncing around in my head for around 4 or 5 years now. I've always had other time and money priorities so I've just put off trying to make this because of it. Well about a week ago I decided enough time had passed thinking about it and it was time to make it happen. I've gone through probably 10 to 15 different designs in my head over the years of how I wanted this to be and figured I'd use that as my guide and just start sticking metal together and see what happens. I've always found rocket stoves to be pretty interesting but never really had a good reason to build one. They burn really hot and clean and that got me thinking that a rocket stove would make the perfect basis for a pizza oven. Plus they are super simple to make. So last week I picked up some steel to get going. And the sticker shock is real, steel has gotten very expensive.
Anyway, I started with the rocket stove portion first. I made it tall enough so that the oven portion would be around waist high so I wasn't bending over all the time to check it. Got it all together and took it for a test run to see how it performed.
The test went well but I discovered a design flaw after running it. When I put it together I put some expanded steel under the combustion chamber to catch hot coals to keep the fire burning hot. Well I used 1/2 inch and it was too small and nothing was dropping through as it burned down blocking off air flow. So I had to cut it back open, cut out the expanded metal and weld in a couple of 1/4 inch rods in it's place. Should work better at catching coals while allowing them to drop down as they burn smaller.
Got it welded back together and started building the frame out of inch square tubing and mounted the rocket stove to it so I could build the rest of it out.
I built a square out of 1/2 inch angle for the pizza stone and mounted it to the frame. Notice that the frame is perfectly square and flat, it's the oven frame that's out of square. Oops!
Added some plate to the rear around the exhaust to seal off the rear bottom of the cook chamber.
This is where the pizza stone sits.
The area under the pizza stone is open to the outside and I got thinking that I'm going to probably lose a lot of heat from the bottom of the stone so I added a piece of plate to the underside and fully welded all sides leaving a 1 inch air gap underneath it. If that's still not enough I can always add a piece of 1 inch rock wool insulation to retain even more heat if needed.
I cut a piece of sheet for the top and ended up taking it to a local fab shop and had them bend it into the shape I needed. It cost me $15 and saved me a bunch of time as my only other option would have been to cut and weld each section. It actually turned out looking a lot nicer too.
I got thinking that I needed a stop of some sorts in case I miss the mark with the peel to prevent shoving a pizza to the rear over the exhaust blast and burning the crap out of it so I added a small piece of flat to the rear of the pizza stone tray.
Now came the time to close off the rear of the cook chamber. This proved to be very tedious for my simple brain to process. Ended up taking me about 3 hours to cut, trim, fit, cut some more and then finally tack them all in place. Geometry is hard.
The last piece of the puzzle was adding a lip to the front to help hold some of the heat in the top.
Last step was to get all of the tacked in pieces welded in. Don't look too closely at my welds, I'm not a welder. I can stick metal together but I would never call myself a welder or fabricator.
And the finished product. Well almost. I still need to test it out and see if it's even going to work like I want and I'm going to paint it with some BBQ paint to make it look better and help hide some of my ugly welds. :-[
Thanks for looking.
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