I had covered the template with paper so the mortar didn't stick to the wood, thus i have patches of mortar and paper at the joins in the arch
Here's a close up, you can see here we have 2 different situations, 1 is that the joint is filled and has excess the other is there is a gap where no mortar got all the way down.At this moment I don't have an opinion on which situation is best, all I can tell you is what i did next.
yesterday i crawled into the dome on my back with gloves, googles, mask, spotlight and angle grinder and started to remove the excess. It was a VERY awkward and duty job. The result was the places where the mortar didn't go all the way to the botom of the brick and there was a gap.. THAT mortar was brittle? so I had to grind it back a bit INSIDE the joint to get to firm mortar. THIS is the stuff thats going to eventually drop into your pizzas ! so best to get rid of it NOW.
The BEST joint i have is actually the one that had heaps of excess on the outside, once i ground it back it is a PERFECT joint, solid, smooth and i know it isn't going to drop anything into my pizzas.
So in hidesight maybe making sure the mortar reaches the oven is the best method? what i was trying to do when building the arch was to use as little mortar as possible but now i think that is wrong, in the case that my bricks were not perfectly straight/square so in reality it was silly of me to expect i could get away with "no mortar joints" or little mortar joints.
SOO if you are using non perfect bricks (which i think in reality ever one is ! ) then go with making sure the mortar reaches the inside of the oven, THIS will be further proved in my next post so read on.
