...I have mostly been building a pizza oven for some friends.

http://tinyurl.com/pdzzdxa

Hey, that looks like our (new) backyard. Care to drop over and help us with our oven later on?

The one you built appears to be on top of a wood storage bin. Is that right?

Definitely gotta get ours built, likely next summer.

Cheers!

Please, a description of how you did the time-lapse photography.

tanstaafl.

I put my iPhone in my Glif, put it on my Joby mini tripod and use the built in timelapse mode on the iPhone camera app.

The timelapse mode on the iPhone is clever enough to vary the number of images it captures/uses as the length of the time lapse increases. i.e. it captures images quickly to start with, but then starts discarding the earlier ones if you run it for a long time. The end result is a short-ish video, which is probably what most people want most of the time.

No doubt there are also dozens/hundreds of time lapse apps in the Apple/Android app stores, with more flexibility than Apple's own time lapse mode.

It might be a little far to just pop over...

I'll probably be documenting the process when I get round to it. Though I don't know for sure it works yet ! (it needs to dry a bit before we can actually see what temperature it reaches)

Yes, underneath is intended for wood storage, though to be honest it is much too deep (the plinth is 140cm square). I didn't build/design the plinth.

I've not decided what to build our own one on yet.

Glif:

http://www.studioneat.com/products/glif

Joby:

http://joby.com/gorillapod/magnetic

Cool project. I don't have a big enough yard to contemplate that sort of project!

I ask in total ignorance: When looking at the flickr, were the cracks on the outside expected? Are they a problem?

-jk

More cracks than expected, but not really a problem. It is going to get finished in a lime render in the end.

I like the bit of everybody stomping on the dry mortar over and over before you added the water to it. Was it unnecessarily lumpy and needed to be more finely powdered?

Sadly, my own yard is too small to contemplate something like this. Plus mosquitos.

The dry mortar you referred to was clay. We had expected to be building it with "normal" clay that had been just dug out of the ground.

There was plenty of "normal" clay available on site. However when the friends we were building the oven for tried to dig it out they found it was full of large stones, which wouldn't work well for oven building.

They had trouble tracking down alternative supplies of clay locally. In the end they stumbled upon some unusual clay at a local quarry. What they found was ball clay.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ball_clay

What they ended up with was 500kg of a mixture of fine powdered clay and up to fist sized lumps of dry compacted clay. It was not at all what we expected to be working with !

We tried stomping on it, crushing under paving stones, rolling things over it. After several hours work (not shown in that video) we still had a mixture of powder and solid lumps.

We were about to give up, we couldn't see a way of breaking the lumps up in a sensible time. Our last idea was just to add water, stomp on it and hope.

Thankfully that worked, though the resulting clay was still a bit lumpy in places.