Tool Time

I bought a new tool this week.

This doesn’t happen very often. I’m not really a tool guy. I get no particular satisfaction out of household projects or mechanical adventures, which I regard in much the same way as I regard dentistry – useful and probably good for me in the long run, but nowhere in the top 400 things on my list of enjoyable ways to spend time – and the last time I bought a tool Obama was still in office. It was a small handsaw, as I recall. It was a very good handsaw – still is, in fact. I have used it within the last twelve months, I’m sure of it. If you are in the market for a handsaw, I can highly recommend this particular model. But yeah, that was a while ago.

This week I bought a digital infrared thermometer.

It is a snazzy little thing, shaped like the price-checker you’d find at your local supermarket back when they had such things. You point it at whatever object whose temperature you want to measure, pull the trigger, and on the screen on the back it pretty much instantly tells you how hot whatever it is you’re pointing at is. It can do this in Celsius or Fahrenheit, anywhere from “Yikes, that’s cold!” to “What happened to Dave that he’s just a smoking black ruin now?” It runs on a nine-volt battery that we now have a surplus of since we’ve switched to lithium-ion battery powered smoke detectors, which is handy.

I had to go to the local Tool Establishment to get this thing, since the even more local Hardware Store that opened in my neighborhood does not carry such things. I always feel like a liberal arts tourist when I go into places like that, and there was a fair bit of back and forth while finding the sale price of the thing (they don’t carry the sales flyers in store anymore, apparently – you just have to know), but eventually I walked out of the store with both tool and dignity intact.

It is a top notch thing as these things go.

The reason for this is that we have a new pizza oven in the back yard, one that I built myself from plans downloaded from the internet which instantly made me suspicious but if you can’t trust Manly Men Making Things Online who can you trust?

Don’t answer that.

The plans called for 47 (precisely) bricks and three stone slabs, all of which could be obtained at our nearby Big Chain Hardware Store and then re-obtained at our Local Brick Place when those turned out to be substandard.  The Local Brick Place also sold me 7 more bricks since the plans woefully underestimated the number of bricks that were required to make this thing functional.

There’s no mortar involved, which is good because a) this means that it is not a Permanent Structure and therefore requires no building permit, and b) it also means that I could build it just by piling heavy things on top of each other until the desired shape was achieved. This is how they built the Pyramids, after all.

So I watched the instructional video six or eight times, noting with some puzzlement the idea expressed by the Manly Man that this pizza oven with its quick assembly time and lack of mortar could be a great addition to a camping trip as if people often carry 47 (or 54) bricks with them when they walk through the woods, and then took screenshots of the plans so I could print them out for later. They’re pretty simple plans.

It took me a couple of tries to get the oven right since it turned out that the first set of bricks had bumpy things on the outside (for spacing, apparently) that would not work for this project and the stone slabs were the wrong thickness (which only really mattered for the middle one) and then I needed more bricks to finish things and let me tell you that when you return to a place from which you have purchased exactly 47 bricks people remember you, but eventually it was there, waiting to make pizzas.

The deal is that you get some wood (we had a bundle of firewood left over from last summer that had been sitting in the garage all winter so it was nice and dry) and set it on fire in the lower cavity, and then you put the pizzas in the upper cavity and, well, bake them.

This seemed imprecise, and I noticed that the Manly Man had one of these tools to help him out in the video, which is why I ended up buying the snazzy new digital infrared thermometer. It allows me to measure the temperature of the upper cavity with far more accuracy than my pizzas really require without getting second-degree burns on my hand and even while remaining far enough away from the open flames that I can mostly still breathe through the wood smoke. So, win.

We tried it out last night.

There are a couple of things we will need to tweak for the next time, all of which derived from the fact that the upper cavity didn’t get hot enough. It was about 600F (315C) and really needed to be around 650-700F (345-370C) which makes a big difference in pizzas. We either need to build a bigger fire or make the upper cavity smaller to hold more heat or do something else or some combination of all of that and then some. Perhaps a door of some kind, though that adds a layer of complexity that I’m not sure I want to deal with, frankly. We probably need to get new yeast for the dough as well, though that’s hardly the fault of the oven.

We'll see if this requires further tools.