A Homestead Wood Fired Pizza Oven – Getting the material ready

Taking the BBQ’s apart turned out to be pretty easy – for the most part.  The segments were joined by spot welds, rivets or screws and bolts.

I had been worried that the latter – the screws and bolts would create a problem, but for the most part the were made from stainless steel and disassembled easily enough.  A few of the screws were stubborn and needed to be ground off but those were the exception.

The rivets were handled by using the angle grinder to remove most of the head and then driving the remainder out.

Finally the spot welds were broken by progressively working a flat bladed screw driver into the gap until the weld broke.  In some cases this resulted in a bit of tearing of the material but for the most part a pretty clean break resulted.

The next challenge was to get the material back into flat sheets so that a proper inventory could be taken and choices made as to how to cut the pieces made.   To start I used vice grips to bend the tabs flat.  Then I simply stepped on them … and this did flatten them out enough to make further work on them more reasonable.

I next attempted to finish the process with rubber mallets – assisted by the minions who are also hungry for wood fired pizza – that got us further along but not far enough.  I tried to follow up by using a ball peen hammer either directly or indirectly though a wood block… no dice.  Using the hammer directly left ugly marks and started to stretch the material – a counterproductive action, while using the wood block as the intermediary didn’t serve much more after we’d already used the mallets.

So then I hit up the 50 ton hydraulic press and it worked great.  I only used about 5 tons of force so using a jack under say a car might be an option for those without this advantage.  But hydraulic presses are reasonably priced and you certainly don’t need a 50 ton unit to accomplish this.  The sheets came out nice and flat, the seams were still visible but flat so layout should be easy after this.

So now I have a nice pile of flattened stainless steel sheets – mostly heavier gauge – some a bit light… some square, some rectangular and some oddities.  So my next step is to figure out what size of unit I have material enough to build… Stay tuned for more.