The Outer Door Story, The Closure

Well once I got the door fabricated, aligned, the hinges attached and hung I had to figure out how to keep the door closed. I settled on a simple latch system. Well I thought is was going to be simple, little did I know.

OK so the first thing I did was to attach the upright portion of the latch to the frame I built on the oven. I had left a stub a stabilized stub on the right side of the oven. I had to add a short horizontal piece so that the vertical latch was moved past the bricks so the 3/8 inch rebar had clearance room so it didn't scrape the brick every time it was opened or closed. This was the easy part.

Now here is where it got interesting. I had to figure out how to offset the handle and attach it to the door. So I came up with the idea of using a bolt and welding the handle part of the latch to the top. This way I could drill a hole in the door and put a nut and washer on the backside and all would be good, yeah right! It turns out that the handle needed support. Without the support the handle flopped all over bouncing off the brick and it didn't hold the door in place. So my solution was to use 3 nuts that were over sized just enough for the bolt to pass through them. The bolt that I used had a smooth shank with the end threaded so it wouldn't catch on anything. So I measured it out and three nuts were just long enough for the offset that I needed. So I welded the nuts together and them lined them up over the hole that I had drilled in the door and welded them to the the door. This worked great to support and firm up the door handle.

You can see here in this picture that I ended up using 2 nuts on the backside of the door. 1 nut was just too loose. Even when I tightened it down just by using the handle it would loosen up and it would pull the handle off angle. So to solve the problem I used a flat washer as a backer and set one nut to the right position then used a second nut screwed up tight against the first. This keeps both nuts from moving and has worked very well.

With the handle being attached like this it's not solid with the door so the handle itself stays cool enough to touch even when the oven has been in use for hours and the door is too hot to touch.

Overall I've been very pleased with how the door came out as well as how it functions. Now I just can't wait until we get the outer layers on so the frame will be hidden.