Sheet metal and wooden poles removed

Here's the final wall.

Now it's time to fill in that big gap in the middle to create a surface to build the oven on.

As you can see we're keeping the concrete moist with wet towels and plastic to allow it to cure completely. The weather here is so hot and windy that without such steps the concrete would dry out too quickly.

Those concrete blocks which have been lying around the garden for a long time and taking up space are the first bit of fill to go in there.

Wall completed!!

Finally after about three months of working on the wall every other Friday, We poured the last bit of concrete.

On the bottom is my younger brother Paz who also helped tremendously.

Boy, I'm sure no other part of this project will be as long and hard!

A little more than one course of stone left

About one and a half more courses of stone remaining.

As we went up we knocked long sticks of wood into the ground to allow newly arranged stones to lean on them. That way we could secure the stones by pushing small stones under them from behind to push them out towards the sticks.

The begining of a beatiful oven base wall!

And I'm mixing the first batch of concrete

Sheet metal boundary is ready!

We ended up mixing about 50 kgs. of portland cement with sand and gravel by hand (we have no quickcrete and the likes here) for the whole base wall. Unfortunately we hardly took any pictures of the building process until almost the completion of the wall.

The wall was faced with flint stone from around where we live. We did one course of stone at a time, arranging the stones in a circle with a space left between them and the sheet metal. The stones were held in place by their own weight and by securing them with little bits of stone under them. This wasn't at all easy due to the fact that they had all kinds of odd shapes.

Then concrete was poured in the space between the stones and the sheet metal and manually vibrated to allow it to reach between the stones.

My brother Hallel is preparing the sheet metal that will serve as the inner boundary for the base wall.

The sheet metal was and old road sign some one threw out. It has served quite well for all kinds of projects involving pouring concrete in our garden.

Before setting up the sheet metal we dug about 10 cms. in the earth to enable the first bit of concrete to be poured in the created trench.

Preparing to build the wall of the oven base

My brother Hallel is marking the inner perimeter of the round wall of the oven base.

He stuck a twig in the center of the intended area, tied to it a string as long as of the determined radius and tied a chisel to the other end. Then he marked a circle in the earth.