To keep a good fire burning, we've learned that you want to have your fire pit no more than twenty inches tall, that's five courses of stone and we use about fourteen stones per course.
The stone we're using to build this fire pit is angled on the side. It's also rough cut on the front to give it a more natural appearance and then right hear you have a line that helps you offset the stones as you build the pit.
Foundation:
This first course is important. It's the foundation for the rest of the fire pit and it has to be level all the way around. To lay in our second course of blocks, we're going to start overlapping one course over the other. That's what these score marks are for, they help you line up the blocks for the next course.
Here's a tip and I learned this the hard way. I built this fire pit once before and I built it this high before I put in the gravel in and you need gravel in the bottom.
It's a lot easier to do it now when you only have a couple of courses layed down. Here's another tip. Every once in a while you want to hang a string over the edge with a weight on the bottom to make sure that your walls are perpendicular to the ground.
Air Flow:
Periodically you'll leave gaps in the stone and we do that for a reason. The gaps allow for better air flow into the fire.
You're going to want to stablize your bottom course of stone. To do that we're taking some of our extra gravel and putting it around the bottom and you put that in all the way around.
Fit The Ring:
We use this steel ring to make sure that each courses style is round and that the ring will fit in it. Now that we have all our courses built except for the last one, we put this ring in place permanantly. It's in and it fits perfectly, now we put our last course on and we're done.
Finish:
Well, we're at the end of our day. This has been a great project for a single day. All we have to do now is put the grate in and it's time for dinner. We've got a nice fire going and we're cooking dinner.
A couple of tips: One, always keep a bucket of water and a shovel near by. Two, never use river stone, it can explode. |
