Milling curved timbers for a wood-fired oven

[ZachAK]

EDIT: Changed the name of this thread, to answer more questions on the wood-fired oven...

My favorite things in this forum are:
1. The great advice on chainsaw milling from all of you
2. pictures of milling.

So here are some pictures.



I couldn't take pictures of milling this 6' Alaskan Yellow Cedar butt because it was dark and stormy a few days back when I milled them, but here are some of the finished slabs. I milled them at 4". Maximum width was just shy of 28" which barely squeezed by on my smaller Alaska mill with 36" bar.
Where I milled is underwater in this photo, and this is top of high tide. Pretty nice to have the ocean take your chips away!
The stump had a big sweep to it, and I'm cutting most of the slabs for knees and braces.


This is looking down from my lumber shed on the beach, getting ready to rip the slabs with a jigsaw. Yep, not too fast ripping a curve with a 6" 6TPI blade, but I don't live on the road system, and it would be a heavy haul by boat to get these slabs to a big ship saw (bandsaw).
At the top of the picture are a couple of other yellow cedar logs I'll probably mill up soon. One floated right by my house a few months back! Just over 24" W by 8', clear, and very tight growth rings.


These are the rough 4X4 braces, just under 6' long. I gerry-rigged an airchuck to the jigsaw to keep the sawdust clear.
The 4X4s parallel the grain and feel hecka strong.




And that's a yellow cedar knee, on a yellow cedar log, with a low-hanging yellow cedar branch above. Gotta love yellow cedar!
You'll have to excuse the mess of lines tying up one of the logs...the ocean swell keeps breaking lines on the higher tides, and my answer is to just to tie up a number of sacrificial lines.

And that's it for now...

 

[beachcomber]

Nice pics, thanks for sharing. I just love finding yellow cedar. What are you building, a ship?

 

[ZachAK]

Nice pics, thanks for sharing. I just love finding yellow cedar. What are you building, a ship?

A ship would be great... Two projects: braces for my new yellow cedar lumber shed, and small purlins (like rafters) for an outside wood-fired oven with a curved roof. Pizza and fresh bread never taste better than from a wood-fired oven!

Great forum name, by the way.

 

[john taliaferro]

Hard to back up to admire your work their , were gonna need more pictures . must be nice having nice logs come to your door on their own .

 

[Dave Boyt]

Great photos! Looking forward to pictures of the completed projects.

 

[ZachAK]

I planed and sanded 4 of the curves a few days ago, and just got around to taking some pictures because it's pretty hard to take a decent picture with the sun low and the forest darkish.



A 3" power plane did pretty well on the outside of the curve, though the adjustment on the depth is about a 1/4 turn between nothing and very deep, owing to the outside radius. A friend has a power compass plane with a flexible base that does both concave and convex, but I don't. Only a manual compass plane, and they tend to grab the grain.

On the inside of the radius I touched up the big bumps with a 4" angle grinder and 24 grit, then moved to a belt sander with 80 grit.

The outer edges were pretty easy with a 12" thickness planer. Kinda fun moving a curve through the 12" wide opening.

Total time about an hour from bring the tools outside to having them back in. No fancy finishes, just doesn't merit it.

I'll post some finished pictures once my wife and kids are done with the wood-fired oven and I can cut these curves to put the roof on.

Happy milling!

 

[betterbuilt]

If you have any picture of the oven I'd be interested. I've be thinking about building one for years. There's nothing better then fresh sourdough from a wood fired oven.

 

[TheViking]

If you have any picture of the oven I'd be interested. I've be thinking about building one for years. There's nothing better then fresh sourdough from a wood fired oven.

X2

 

[betterbuilt]

I forgot to say those curved timbers are very cool.

 

[ZachAK]

If you have any picture of the oven I'd be interested. I've be thinking about building one for years. There's nothing better then fresh sourdough from a wood fired oven.

Hey Guys,

I'm happy to post some pictures of the oven under construction and when done.
My wife is the one heading up that side of things, and she's roughly following a process outlined by a dude who's been doing it for years.

Here's a short step-by-step on wood-fired ovens.

And here's his book.

It's a pretty cool design, made of sand, clay, dirt (in some cases), and hay (or long hollow grasses). Most people build them on a rock foundation raised up above the ground, but it made sense to go right on our porch deck, so I milled up some red and yellow cedar, and beefed up the deck.

The picture is terrible because of the contrast between low Alaskan sun and darker forest. What you see on top is just the sand mold that will be removed once the oven itself is formed. Waiting for dry, above freezing weather to build that.
Beneath the oven itself are firebricks, and 10 inches depth of rock and gravel with beer bottles are the bottle to form better insulation and go lighter on the CSMilled red cedar floor. That's a scribed flat rock in the red cedar face—you scrape the coals out of the oven before baking. It's all held up with a 3X18 yellow cedar risers on each side.



Better pictures to follow.

 

[betterbuilt]

Very cool. I didn't know they used a sand cast to form the dome. I've mostly been looking at the stone ovens. I had to remove part of my stone chimney last year so I have this huge pile of stones that screams bread oven. I'll have to wait till spring at this point. Thanks for sharing. Looking forward to more pictures.

 

[mdavlee]

Good job. Cool stuff for sure.

 

[GaTreeStumper]

I wondered what you were building. how big is your oven going to be?

 

[ZachAK]

EDIT: Changed the name of this thread, to answer questions on the wood-fired oven.
-------
The oven is done with a little more work on the surrounding structure still to do. I waited until the oven was mostly finished before putting up the curved rafter pairs.
-------


In this photo you can see I joined the rafters at the peak with timberlocks, and tied them to the base with the same. The oven is scored here, and ready for the 2" thick finish coat.



It's mostly done here. Fired up the oven for 48 hours to drive the moisture out. I'm not real happy with the chunkiness of the ridge cap. You can barely see that I vented the ridge cap to let smoke out, but the full 2" looks a bit fat to me. Might just pull it down and slim 'er down a bit. My 12 year old kindly donated some copper sheet (that he salvaged from an old beached fishing boat) to run down the middle of ridge cap.
I kept the roof pretty high above the oven, and I'm happy with that seeing how the flames shoot out when you're really getting things up to temp.


Had to come up with a custom beveled siding profile to fit the curve. That was about an hour and half on the table saw running all of the siding through. An old salty friend says the profile is similar to what he'd call a dinghy lap.



I tried to get the tape in there to answer your question, GaTreeStumper, about oven size. Just a hair under 48" diameter over all. Walls about 11" thick, so 2 foot circle inside. The door looks small, but apparently you don't want a huge door because you'll just let out more heat. Looks big enough in there for a small fire and two smaller pizzas.
I cut a piece of stainless for the back of the door, cause that oven is hot!



And that was tonight. The sourdough starter is doing it's thing, but my wife couldn't wait to cook something in it, so baked potatoes and venison steaks (baked on the oblong cast iron skillet you can see in the oven.) Potatoes were great, and the steaks were very good, but we should have heated up the oven a bit more for the steaks.

Pretty fun project. I milled everything except the 1X6 red cedar siding, which was just resawn to profile on the tablesaw.

 

[betterbuilt]

Awesome. Thanks again for sharing. The upper cap, from here it looks like if you just eased the lower edge it would look fine. It actually compliments the stone coming out of the oven.

Sourdough even. I've been baking with sourdough for a year now. It's pretty cool. I even made sourdough chocolate chip cookies a few days ago.

 

[ZachAK]

Dang, Betterbuilt, that's some good looking bread! Perhaps we were thinking along the same line about easing the lower edge of the ridge cap, since I just hit the corner edge a wee bit.


Realized I didn't have a completed side picture. You can see where the smoke vents. All that pretty red and yellow cedar will eventually end up black on the inside. Oh well, better used than perfect.

I also hosed down the siding and tacked some copper on from the inside where water was weeping through a few knot holes. I figured it'd leak a little, but that's the difference between a buck per board foot and who-knows-what-expensive for clear red cedar.

Five loaves hit the oven tomorrow!

 

[betterbuilt]

Exactly what I was thinking with the cap. Thanks for the compliments on the bread. I'm attaching a pic of an oven I saw in the amazon at a animal rehab.

I'd like to see pics of the loafs if they come out alright.