Double Skinned Oven
Using a home made metal box.
to bake bread, roast meat etc.

"This page contains plans and designs to enable you to make a more complex super efficient outdoor or indoor oven suitable for baking bread, pastries and meats.

The Double Skinned Oven

This oven is manufactured from some bricks, cement, angle iron, sheet metal and some pop rivets and nuts & bolts.

The oven was designed to be used out-doors and will provide baking facilities for a large family or small community's daily needs.

The brick structure is straightforward and incorporates a metal fire grill of a type that will allow ashes to fall, or be raked through into the ash pit, allowing the oven to be kept lit 24 hours a day if necessary. Expanded steel decking would be best for the metal grill.

The chimney can be made from regular stove pipe if available, but, in an emergency, used tin cans can be opened at both ends, snipped at one end to reduce the diameter, and forced inside each other to act as a chimney. Be aware that the tin can chimney method will burn out much quicker than with regular stove pipe.

Principles of use

Most simple single skin ovens will cause the items being baked to burn on the bottom if using a fire beneath. This design avoids this and allows a large degree of temperature control through the use of a double (convection) skin and vents.

The inner skin (the oven itself) is completely enclosed, so neither smoke nor direct heat damages the food. The outer skin has holes in the base for heat to enter. It is then channeled around and up, trapped between inner and outer walls. A vent on the roof of the outer wall allows the heat to escape, or not. The more open the vent is, the cooler the oven. The more closed it it, the less heat escapes, and the hotter the oven. The oven has been thoroughly tested, and it has been found that with the vent open, and a small fire beneath, the oven (with a dish of water in the bottom) can also serve as a bread prover.

A vent on the door of the oven can give additional temperature control, but shouldn't really be necessary.

Of course the oven need not necessarily be used on bricks. It has been loaded onto the back of a pick-up and used at camp over a trench fire.

The oven can be made any size. The best way of increasing the size is to lenghten it. That way, if used over a trench fire, the trench just needs to be lenghtened.

Estimate at the outset, the size you think you will need and adjust the dimensions accordingly.