Mobile Wood Fired Pizza Oven

So we have been talking about building a mobile pizza oven to go with our farm's big barbeque for a while now. I built an oven for my house a while ago and love it. It makes for a great day after working at the winery. Go home, have a beer, play with fire for a little while and finally eat pizza. We wanted something like that at the winery but have been going around and around as to how to do it. I finally took the plunge and got started on it this week. I don't really know what I am doing here, but so far so good.

Whats the worst that can happen right?

I am trying to use as much found (not purchased) material as I can for this project. Hopefully all I will need to buy is welding rod and bricks (I have had to buy a couple of pieces of steel that I couldn't pull out of the farm's scrap bin...but hopefully that is the end of purchases!).

I am hoping to get a finished clay oven with a 43" inside cooking surface that we can pick up with a forklift and put on the back of our pig roasting trailer.

The first step was to cut a piece of steel and reinforce it with channel iron.






The next step was to lay another series of channel down for stiffening the frame in the opposite direction and to give us something to get the forklift underneath.

After that we laid out the insulating fire bricks, which are to be the base of the oven. We then welded some angle iron on in order to hold the bricks tightly together on the top of our steel structure. I took this opportunity to shoot a little high temp engine paint on this thing so it wouldn't look quite so "rustic".



The final thing I did today was to add a fine layer of sand as a bed for our fire bricks and start the brick layout. Because our bricks are held together tightly by steel angle iron I figured it would be fine to skip the fancy patterns and just lay them seam to seam. I guess we will see how it works out.
So that is all I have done at the moment. The next step is going to be gathering the clay and mixing it with sand to build the dome. I should be getting going with that in the next couple of days as time allows. Then on to pizza...and more importantly beer! Or wine I guess, if you know where to find any.

-Neil