Well in the last post you saw that I had made a few bricks. Since then I made a few more. In total we made 240 bricks. I decided to use some of the bricks for the rest of the chimney but, I had to fill some big cracks caused by the weather before I began laying the bricks for the chimney.
As you can see in the last 2 pictures I also had cracks on each side of the brick arch that I needed to fill as well. I mixed up a heavy slip to work into the cracks and fill them. I found additional small weather cracks on the face of the upper chimney as well. There was also some areas of grouting between the bricks of the arch that had to be repaired. So I used the heavy slip to fill all of the cracks then mixed the heavy slip with sand to fill the grouting between the bricks.
Once the cracks were filled I was able to begin adding to the chimney. I used 28 bricks to make the chimney. The first thing I did was to use a thin clay slip on top of the existing chimney so that a new layer of cob used as mortar would bond to the existing chimney.
OK so why am I adding more to my chimney? Well when my oven is going full blast to fire it I have seen as much as 2 foot flames coming out of the chimney. Plus when cooking pizzas and other live fire cooking I have had lots of heat and ash exit the chimney at the same level as my head. I felt that it would be good to raise that level.
So I laid a bed of mortar and leveled it out. Then I began laying bricks. I found that dry laying the bricks first was a big help. What I mean by dry laying is to lay out and cut the bricks with mortar spacing so you know how to mortar everything together. Don’t set the down into the mortar until you are ready to mortar in between the bricks as well.
Once you have dry laid your row of bricks like I did you will be ready to mortar them into place. I mortared all of my bricks in place and had enough mortar left to begin plastering the chimney and even out the chimney.
So I still have the rest of the of the chimney to plaster but, the chimney has grown.