the sauna follies - cob oven, sauna, and aspiring hot tub part 1

About three weeks in - chicken wire frame and UVa-Real Tree Camo Busch Beer boxes showing... (someone over there at Busch Beer is a genius) photo courtesy Trevor Cox

about a week later having been fired a few times, Busch boxes gone, now need to coat it in a more lasting concrete + sand mixture + do some decorations

About a month ago my backyard blazing habits caught the attention of the local po-po... with genuine courtesy they asked that large (ok, yeah, 20' plus) flames not be created in the city.

Fair enough... it had been a nice run...

About six months prior Prof. Bill Bennett at UVa loaned me a Bread Oven book and a DVD by Andre Rublev. Before reading these books I thought that cob was some hippie's idea of building with corn on the cob... well anyhow... it isn't, it's a many thousands year old technique, and it rocks.

To begin with I raided some old construction dumpsters and hauled some short rebar sticks. Welded up a frame and began wrapping it in chicken wire. Around the chicken wire old beer boxes covered the wire to keep the cob from falling in. The oven measures about 10' wide x 5' deep x 5' tall from the outside, and the inner cave is more like 8' wide x 4' deep x 4' tall...

With the help of Lee French - in town for the weekend, and $19.95 - 1,000 lbs of sand made its way from Allied Concrete to the back yard and the mixing began. Mixing with the clay, and leaves from the yard plus some water, the form of the oven began to emerge. It took about two weeks of slow building plus another 500 lbs of sand (thanks Tim Hazelwood) and then another 500 lbs (thanks Hunter Cridlin) to finish the roughed up structure.**

On average I mixed ~100 lbs of sand + ~100 lbs of clay + a 55 gallon trash can full of leaves at a time on a nice blue tarp. Each batch took ~30 minutes to fully mix and stack on the oven. The walls are on average 6-8" thick, although they get much thicker in some places. Towards the end glass bottles were inserted into the structure to keep the cob from falling off, and to add some extra funkiness.

Over the sessions a sense of mixing readiness emerged... use of straw in the final several batches seemed nice, although not necessarily an improvement over the leaves. More sand than clay might have been better too... all said and done the mixture stacked up fine.

As Mike Kippers at Gaston and Wyatt noted, it's best to burn these slow at first.... I've been lighting fires now for about a week, usually slow and small... meant to get the oven up to temperature and slow baking.... The oven has now received about 40 hours of flame, and it's beginning to harden on the outside.... the inside had a few cave ins where the leave hadn't mixed sufficiently - a few lost inches here and there, otherwise looking nice... last nights flames were still felt on the outside wall this morning... hopefully in another few weeks the whole thing'll bake solid.

**NB - for reasons the author in no way understands always buy 1,000 lbs from Allied at a time. It costs less. 500 lbs'll set you back $26.95, and 1,000 lbs is $19.95... Thanks to Andy at Allied for helping me with this...


next up... the sauna....