Just wanted to provide an update here on a current project. It's been exciting times. We have been in Petaluma, California since 9/8 building two new ovens for one of the long time foundational wood fired bakeries on the West Coast, Della Fattoria. This bakery is featured in the Alan Scott book, The Bread Builders. This is a high production bakery- 365 days per year, 1000 loaves per day.
We were contacted by Della Fattoria in just June of this year. Things went into motion right away as they had some concerns over the structural integrity of their existing wood fired brick ovens, and felt the need to plan around getting new ovens built rather than to have an "oven meltdown" one day and completely see their operation fall into chaos. We quickly went into design mode, re-amping the shape of our 6' x 9' hearth oven to allow for greater seismic resistance and enhanced harnessing. We planned for two side by side 6' x 9' hearth black ovens to fit to the original foundation built by Alan Scott. The attached image here is the drawing for the cores that we designed for the project- note the rugged harnessing including the steel angles in the four corners that will tie to strapping tied into the poured concrete foundation.
The project has been run on site by Antoine Guerlain, and with assistance from masons Jeremiah Church and Carsten Homstead. As of today, 9/28/11, they have progressed through the hearths, side walls, back walls, cast lintels and most of the vaulting. Things have come together very well and the support from the Webber family has been tremendous. We'll finish the cores, insulate the ovens, build up the steel stud and cement board walls, connect the chimneys and leave the oven facade to Yunker Webber, who is planning on building a stainless steel oven front.
Many thanks to Della Fattoria and the Webber family for this opportunity.