He rebuilt the firebox to include more brick than before. I later bricked the inside of the firebox to further enhance the ‘flamethrower effect’. He made the baffle itself more angled so that flame was siphoned off better when it runs against it from the firebox. The boilermaker built a more sophisticated and heavy duty baffle system, based on my ideas. The top decks have always relatively slow, so we set out to improve the heat here at same time. The first two prototypes, both named Bertha, turned out to be absolute pigs of ovens, but pigs which were made to sing for their supper nonetheless, thanks to my need to bake decent bread. Actually, I became the crash test dummy more often than not. I was the test pilot and outside design consultant. We removed her from the trailer after the Tour Down South, and a boilermaker began the task of refurbishing her, with design modifications we had now applied to some of our other ovens. I towed her here to the farm, and she was parked again for a few more months. When the first Bush Bakery at Ellalong came to an end, I packed Luna up in the trailer, took out her bricks, and parked her in a nearby paddock, where she lived for a few months. She did her job as a test bed and we improved our Aromatic Embers ovens as a result. She eventually became an excellent oven, capable of baking an average of 30 average sized full sourdogh loaves an hour - provided I was on my game - and more if someone was helping me. She was, for many years, a ‘work in progress’. I learned the hard way with Luna, every time, but after each rebuild she returned to work, better than ever. I had to rebuild the firebox a couple of times, and used a crowbar to open up a pathway for flue gases when it fatigued after about 5 years use. She had some hot spots (which became completely ‘worked around’, as one does with any old bakery oven), and she needed a major clean out and overhaul every year, or she would block up (and actually melt) in parts. She was always a bit tricky to work with - she liked to be pre heated for a good 5 hours before she would really begin to sing, for example. I knew the difference Luna made - a kind of crust that only a brick oven can give you. She lived on a fixed site, still on the mobile bakery trailer, at a bush hideaway in Ellalong, where she performed the weekly baking duties for local Saturday markets with incredible finesse. Luna found her place as a stationary oven.
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