Cob; Rocket mass oven and Rumford fireplace

We’ll be building a Rumford fireplace as well as a rocket mass oven with a heated bed and bench at an amazing beautiful location in the forest by Zensee, some 90 km from Berlin. We’ll also make an earthen bread/pizza oven, start a cob structure and likely some initial layers for an earthen floor.

The workshop may appear expensive, however there’s plenty of discounts for early registrations, couples/groups etc.

Cob is an old English word for a building material which is a mixture of straw and sand/clay, and it was ‘re-discovered’ by Ianto Evans of the Cob Cottage Company.

Ianto also developed the rocket mass oven, which is one of the most effective ways to burn wood to heat mass. It burns like a rocket, and it seriously provokes you to rethink everything you ever thought you knew about fire; drafts, chimneys, etc. It’s all outlined in this book, which also is available as a pdf. We will be creating an extremely long Rocket Mass Heating bench.

When Count Rumford returned to London many years ago, he found that the city was unbearably smoky. Consequently, he set about developing a vastly superior design for the traditional open-hearth fireplace. With the Rumford fireplace, the 3 walls reflect a maximum of the heat into the room, while the ‘throat’ circulates the wood-gasses (thereby eliminating a great deal of the smoke). The Rumford we’ll make is made from a few fire bricks and cob, which allows for a lot of creativity in the design.

Last but not least: Cob is a wonderful material, but very labour intensive as it’s usually mixed by feet; in the olden days by the hooves of horses, in modern times by the feet of dancing people. We will be doing the mud dance, however we will also have a German premiere of the Czech invented cob machine.

http://www.opensurroundings.com/

Cob Workshop_English_Pg 1_LLR7.pdf (376 KB)

This post was submitted by Max Vittrup Jensen.