I have played with various fire pit options in my backyard for 15 years. I have tons and tons of trees and yard waste and try to burn most or turn it into compost. I have grabbed the saucers from trash piles and used those - can't put much on there and wind blows stuff off easy. I have had an enclosed mini-chimney pit I built from stones. This worked great but was harder to clean and I had to break down the wood into pretty small pieces.
So I have happily moved on to an in ground pit. I dug my pit down about three feet into the ground about four feet long by two feet wide. There is one row of stones below ground level and two rows above ground. It was made from neighbors throw away stones - and the neighbors throw their wood in the pit. It is safe, looks good, and I just shovel it out every 3 months.
The example above is pretty close to what I have done except:
- Mine is longer going left to right
- I have one brick removed on the right so that I can get in and out or prop something up without knocking over bricks. So it is more of a horse shoe.
- My pit goes about a foot above ground. This is so that ashes don't hit grass directly and so that someone can't just walk into it (we are picky about which limbs we burn).
I'm venturing down the path of making a GFRC fire pit (natural gas plate burner application) in the shape of a giant bowl (45" diameter). The bowl pictured below is from Montana Fire Pits and is meant to give an idea of my end goal. I'm looking for a wide top ledge on the finished piece.
I've been researching different techniques / methods for making molds ranging from wood, urethane, silicone, clay slumps, shaping foam blocks, layering over sandcastles using a rotating template, etc. I'm undecided on how best to approach making a mold for this project and would like to hear from more experienced people in this field on how they'd go about doing it.
Aside from the above request, I found a great video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBoYNdtUw14) for building similar, but the video does not provide information on materials used and techniques used off camera. I don't have the experience to fill in the gaps. Questions that arise for me are: (1) what is the white material pressed into the metal lathing to make the mold, (2) what technique was used to build the top ledge so wide towards the center since this was done off camera and the mold doesn't seem to template the inner ledge.
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I have played with various fire pit options in my backyard for 15 years. I have tons and tons of trees and yard waste and try to burn most or turn it into compost. I have grabbed the saucers from trash piles and used those - can't put much on there and wind blows stuff off easy. I have had an enclosed mini-chimney pit I built from stones. This worked great but was harder to clean and I had to break down the wood into pretty small pieces.
So I have happily moved on to an in ground pit. I dug my pit down about three feet into the ground about four feet long by two feet wide. There is one row of stones below ground level and two rows above ground. It was made from neighbors throw away stones - and the neighbors throw their wood in the pit. It is safe, looks good, and I just shovel it out every 3 months.
The example above is pretty close to what I have done except:
- Mine is longer going left to right
- I have one brick removed on the right so that I can get in and out or prop something up without knocking over bricks. So it is more of a horse shoe.
- My pit goes about a foot above ground. This is so that ashes don't hit grass directly and so that someone can't just walk into it (we are picky about which limbs we burn).
The internal bowl/barrel of an old washing machine works well for an above-ground solution - the holes around the sides allow the embers to breathe well and help to radiate heat.
You can add legs as this person has, or simply prop it up on a slab or some bricks.
Just make sure that it IS metal - a lot of the newer/cheaper washing machines use plastic barrels, which... don't work.