[Cob] please help my poor cob oven!!

[phil]

My experience with my first oven taught me to never tarp the oven directly, but instead make sure the tarp does not come into contact with the oven surface. Where we lived in NW North Carolina if the oven or air were damp then the oven would not dry out and you would then run the risk of ruining the surface, especially if the temperature dips toward freezing. A simple lean-to solves the problem until something more lasting can be built.



Phil



 --- On Tue 12/25, Brian Lavelle < redtail at mail.springgrove.coop > wrote:

From: Brian Lavelle [mailto: redtail at mail.springgrove.coop]

To: ninagrimmett at optusnet.com.au

     Cc: coblist at deatech.com

Date: Tue, 25 Dec 2007 12:42:07 -0600

Subject: Re: [Cob] please help my poor cob oven!!



Nina;    I'm no authority, but Kiko Denzer wrote a fine book on oven building.  Consider a roof, even a simple shed roof.   The oven must breathe or it will have crumbling issues.  No finish coat needed, but protection from direct rain is advised.  In fact, a cement mix on the outside will doom the oven to crumble.  Although an oven can be quickly rebuilt, your labor has value, and the simple bee hive oven could last a very long time, if cared for.   Elaborate and highly artistic designs have all the more to protect.  My oven is in Minnesota, and I found it stayed dry with just a tarp thrown over.   Only problem is that if used late in the afternoon with rain imminent, one day the inevitable happened.  I went to bed without tarping and we had an inch of hard rain in the night.  It drilled a hole almost through the oven.  I got lucky and was able to mix up a small batch of cob and patch it.    I have since built a shed roof over it, but still keep it tarped.  As to the cracks, 
they are going to occur. Nothing to worry about.  Good luck rebuilding and  baking.     Redtailninagrimmett wrote:> i have built a cob oven after much research & book reading & thought i had the clay & sand to the instructions, it is all finished now, tho a few cracks in the surface, but from what i have read these are fixable, i have a clay,sand interior, followed two weeks later by a clay straw layer, again followed two weeks later by a clay sand bond crete(for waterproofing) layer, but we have had torrential rain here & despite all our efforts to keep the cob dry, it got soaked & the interior layer was so wet for ages & has started to fall down, i did start a small fire inside to try dry it out & stop the interior crumbling, but bits are still falling .... i was so looking forward to cooking in it soon & am so dissapointed, that all our hard work was in vein, any ideas?? i am new at this & thought all was going great, untill the rain came, any ideas, help, will be so 
greatly appreciated, i dont know if my oven will still be operable, with bits of the first layer of cob missing, it did dry out on the outside and started to on the inside when i had a small fire goin, but i was a bit worried about adding more fuel to the fire, but now more rain   thankyou for your time> _______________________________________________> Coblist mailing list> Coblist at deatech.com> http://www.deatech.com/mailman/listinfo/coblist>>>   _______________________________________________Coblist mailing listCoblist at deatech.comhttp://www.deatech.com/mailman/listinfo/coblist

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