One of the most encouraging and inspiring things about earthen ovens is how varied and diverse they can be. Many a person who has read Build Your Own Earthen Oven has gone outside with a shovel and a tarp and built themselves an oven on a shoe-string budget. This page is your chance to see what others have done and to inspire in return by including photos and comments about your oven and oven-building experience! You can add your story in the comment form at the bottom of this page.
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The Best of Making Things by Ann Wiseman
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Im here in Sonoma County active building lots of cob ovens, cob benches, saunas, huts, and even hot tubs. There are photos and videos on my website. Check it out!
Hi
last year we built a clay oven at Fordhall Community Land Initiative, a community owned organic farm in Shropshire, England. A group of volunteers spent the weekend making it in the community growing area so we could grow food, make dough and cook pizza in one area. We had great fun making it and now have fun using it.
best wishes
Bex
Bex wrote to say that there are updates on their news page on the oven build and other neat projects: http://www.fordhallfarm.com/news.php. Looks like they’re doing cool stuff.
With assistance and ideas from Larry Winiarski we built a Rocket Oven that works extremely well using very little wood and making minimal smoke. You can see captioned photos of the process and the final product on a Picasa album. https://picasaweb.google.com/Jonnygms/RocketOven#slideshow/5598633235210438450
Kiko, Thanks for your book and inspiration. We hope you can make it by to see our stove someday.
Jon and Flip Anderson
Follow this link to see my pizza oven chronicle on facebook (you don’t have to be a facebook member.)
hi everyone.
I have been building earth ovens for over ten years, and was fortunate to work with kiko several years ago when we built an oven at an eco event in wales UK. I have since gone on to building ovens from fire cement, mainly for pizza making at festivals in the UK.
I was commissioned to build a very large bread oven on a campsite in sussex UK and i have posted a link to the slide show of the complete process; in addition i ran a week long bread making course, so there are some pictures of some very happy sacred bakers!!
I hope you enjoy them and are suitably inspired, but just to let you know i do not look at emails/computers much so any questions you may have might take a while to be answered.
Michaelthebaker
https://sites.google.com/a/wowo.co.uk/sacredbaking/wowo-oven-build
Hello: So nice to hear from you. Please see our site. We built an oven using Kiko’s book. I also built one with a group once using a willowish basket technique with the Hiram Trust. I have used the one on our website for about 6 years. Children from our programs have made bread every Monday morning during the school year and then our Dragon takes it into his belly and makes the most delicious bread. . . I recently tore it down in hopes of making a new and improved one. If there is any chance any of you would like to come here and do a workshop please let me know you are interested. (Our dragon has been on a journey for about 3 weeks now and I have promised. We are open to slinging mud, working with bees, etc. Thanks for contacting us! (I am not sending this to post these words, just want to contact you. . . don’t see how to post pictures.)
I built an oven following an earlier edition of Kiko’s book and blogged about it under the category Fire, here http://www.nilspeterson.com/category/projects-and-thinking-related-to-sustainability/fire/
I was in a hurry so I built on a wooden deck on saw horses, and as Kiko’s book predicted, it burned thru. Dismantling the oven gave some insights to the failure and to how much firing had ocured in the inner shell, see http://www.nilspeterson.com/2010/11/30/dismantling-my-mud-oven/
I plan to build a new oven on a heavy duty trailer (with concrete blocks above the wooden deck for greater insulation). I’m talking with a local bakery (http://www.panhandlebread.com/PABC/Home.html) about bringing the oven trailer to their booth at the Moscow Farmer’s Market on Saturdays this summer.
Finally, there are two Flickr photo sharing groups that may interest you
http://www.flickr.com/groups/woodfiredbreadovens/pool/with/2098689023/
and
http://www.flickr.com/groups/forno-horno-ovens-woodfired_ovens-kilns-furnaces-heaters/pool/with/2098689023/
David S. Cargo, who assembles info about community ovens for the St. Paul Bread Club sent me a link about Lily Gordon, a remarkable young woman, now 16, who has been helping villagers in Tanzania to build ovens so they can make their own bread (previously, bread had to be transported from so far that it would often be inedible when it arrived).
At the age of 11, Lily Gordon started raising funds for the village of Shirati, Tanzania. For her 11th birthday, instead of gifts, she asked her friends to bring money for the children of Shirati. The party raised $1,300. Behind Lily are many others, particularly a woman named Christine Nyanda Chacha, a Tanzanian woman who decided that lack of parents and money didn’t need to prevent her from going to school, getting a degree, moving to America, and becoming a teacher in Berkeley — where she sought ways to help her students think past the bounds of affluence and entitlement (for more of this story, click here). Lily is just one of many students who have had this experience, thanks to Ms. Nyanda Chacha. Watch the video to hear Lily tell the story:
Here’s a video of an oven I made with my friends in Argentina.
We used homemade adobe bricks and clay mortar.
You can see more of my work at Firespeaking.
I have your book about earth oven and i build a few of those ovens with people in mud building workshops in israel (also giving credit and publication to your book), so i’m eding a few pictures:
1- an earth oven in ein-gedi
2- set of coocking places two of them are rocket stove and one is not
3- a bench made with children and parents in the entrance to a kinder garden.
4-nice detail
and another thing: i’m looking for information about open fire place to make out of mud. i know it’s not as efficient as rocket mass heater, but it has the qualities of having an open fire indoore and it is made only fot occasionaly use (not every day) and in our place it’s not so cold. so if you know where i can get information about it: proportion,shape, how to make it “throwing” as much hit inside, i would like to know..
thank you very much for all the knoledge and inspiration…
riki
p.s. looking at the pictures i thought you might be interested in pictures of a traditional earth oven i once build with old yamanay ladies (mother of a freind of mine and her neighbors) and we baked in it there traditional bread ans cookies so i add a few more
I feel that building an earthen oven is a “gateway” or initiation into natural building. An oven is like a mini building: it has a foundation, walls and should always have a roof to protect it. One learns about how to make “thermal” cob and “insulative” cob, experiments with sculpture… and creates something remarkably functional and beautiful without too much ado.
Here is a picture of the first oven and natural building project that my brother, Alex, and I built upon reading Build Your Own Earthen Oven:
I have gone on to build many ovens since…. here is another one:
You can see other ovens as well as masonry heaters I have built at firespeaking.com.