Ask a pizzaiolo what a Blodgett 961 is and you'll get a small sermon. These gas deck ovens — 961s, 981s, 1000-series — stack two and three high in pizzerias across the county, and thirty-year-old examples out-bake new mid-range ovens when they're kept right. Keeping them right is the job.
Deck ovens: where the calls come from
- Pilots and thermocouples. The stacked-deck classic: a pilot that won't hold on one deck while its siblings bake on. Thermocouple first, pilot orifice second — a fouled orifice in a flour-dust environment is practically a scheduled event.
- Thermostats and bulbs. When the deck runs wild or won't hold set point, the hydraulic thermostat or its sensing bulb has usually aged out. Bulb placement matters more than most techs treat it — an inch wrong changes the whole bake.
- Cracked or carboned deck stones. The cold-spot complaint in physical form: cracks and carbon buildup steal and skew heat. Stone replacement transforms an old deck — see our cold-spot troubleshooting guide for what owners can check first.
- Burner ports choked with flour dust. Starved burners bake weak and yellow-flamed. Port cleaning restores the flame pattern the oven was designed around.
- Doors, springs, hinges. A deck door opens every ninety seconds all night; when it stops sealing, the front row of pies comes out pale forever.
The stacked-oven detail everyone skips
Double and triple stacks concentrate heat and vibration — the top deck lives a harder life than the bottom, hinges and thermostats age at different rates per position, and an unlevel stack bakes unevenly on every deck at once. When we service a stack we treat it as three machines sharing a hard address, not one oven with extra doors.
DFG and Zephaire convection: the other Blodgett
Blodgett's DFG-100 and Zephaire convection ovens follow the convection script with Blodgett accents: igniter and gas-valve sequences that fail in order (the click-but-no-fire call), blower bearings that announce retirement audibly at temperature, and doors that lose their flush latch and gasket seal — read as mysterious uneven browning until someone checks the latch. All of it is well-supported, quick-turn repair work.
Parts and the repair-first verdict
Blodgett parts support is superb and reaches back decades — thermostats, valves, stones, doors and burners for ovens older than the internet ship routinely. That makes the repair-versus-replace answer for a 961 or 981 nearly automatic: rebuild it. A re-stoned, re-thermostated, port-cleaned Blodgett deck is a better oven than most of what money buys new, at a fraction of the price. Our pizza oven repair page covers the wider deck-oven craft; for scheduled stone, burner and calibration care, there's the maintenance plan.
From Delray slice shops to Wellington family pizzerias — if it says Blodgett, it's our kind of oven: (561) 695-9808.
Palm Beach Restaurant Repair is an independent service company. We repair and maintain Blodgett equipment but are not an authorized dealer for, or affiliated with, Blodgett.