Door materials

[rsandler]

Now that my oven is finished, I'm trying to figure out how to make an insulated door. I have a leftover piece of CaSi board with which to make the core of the door, but I'm looking for input on what to cover it with. There's lots of options and I'm having trouble figuring out which to go with.

Important factors here are durability, conductivity, and ease of construction. I don't have an arc welder, and I've inquired with some metal fabricators and found it to be too expensive. Here's the options I've thought of:

• Cover with two pieces of sheet metal (aluminum or stainless) secured by bolts through the door, using a strip of aluminum flashing to get the edges
• Same as above, but use 1/4" Hardibacker or other cement board.
• Cover/wrap with two pieces of stainless and/or aluminum, with tabs cut and bent around the edges then riveted together.
• Same as above, but use copper sheet (a local roofing supply company will sell me a 18"x60" sheet of 16lb copper for about $50).

Thoughts? Did I miss any important options?

[Les]

Re: Door materials

Now that my oven is finished, I'm trying to figure out how to make an insulated door. I have a leftover piece of CaSi board with which to make the core of the door

* Cover/wrap with two pieces of stainless and/or aluminum, with tabs cut and bent around the edges then riveted together.


Thoughts? Did I miss any important options?

That's the approach I took - worked great.


Here is a pic - link # 178


http://www.fornobravo.com/forum/8/le...d-4207-13.html

[rsandler]

Re: Door materials

I came up with another idea, which is probably a bad idea, but let me propose it anyway. Suppose you sandwich the insulation between two pieces of cement board (which are possibly screwed independently into the insulation with SS screws), then cover the edges with a thin layer of homebrew mortar. I seem to recall that the refractory bricks and mortar are actually rather poor conductors.

Is this totally crazy, mostly crazy, or so-crazy-it-just-might-work?

[deejayoh]

Re: Door materials

I think mortar over the insulation is not going to work. Too brittle, it will break out from the door banging into things.

I'd go with the metal on either side of the insulation. For the edge, I would suggest maybe cutting (or ordering, check out onlinemetals.com) a 2" strip of steel (or whatever you are using). Bend that to the shape of your arch, and buy or make some small "L" brackets to hold it to the back plate. You don't need to secure to both sides, since you are running bolts through the plates.

FWIW, I bought a used HF flux welder off of craigslist to build my door. $80 for a welder + mask. It was pretty fun learning to weld, and the end product actually came out ok. It took a lot of grinding to get it smooth, but it worked! If you have the materials cut, it's also pretty easy to find people on Craigslist who will weld it for you for an hourly charge. That cost will be much less than the cost of fabbing a complete door.

[OzOvenBuilder]

Re: Door materials

Just to give you some more information, here's a link to mine. It works very well, although I would do something different with the handles, as they simply get too hot sometimes so oven mitts or insulation on the handles would be a great idea!

http://www.fornobravo.com/forum/f28/...ign-17110.html

Cheers,
Russell

[ironpony]

Re: Door materials

My thought s so far have been....

an outer metal or concrete product door with studs, think bolts, welded/attached to it. Then use lightweight castable refractory, which I have left over from the dome, to cast a three inch thick door so as to eliminate heat transfer to metal door.

or possibly

just cast the door completely in insulating refractory and attach handles??

right now the oven fully fired with 2.5 inches of this refractory over it only reaches 100 degrees so it should stay cool enough to handle.

[rsandler]

Re: Door materials

I'm not sure how much insulating refractory weights compared to insulating board, but my intuition would be that a door like that would be really heavy. But I'm sure there are others here who have a better idea about how that would work.

[ironpony]

Re: Door materials

insulating refractory is 50 lbs/ cuft medium weight refractory for domes is 130 lbs/cu ft
I would estimate the door at around 10 lbs

[rsandler]

Re: Door materials

Well, I ended up going for aluminum and SS bolts. The edge is made from two strips of aluminum, where the one along the top edge has two tabs which extend under the outer surface and line up with the bolts. Only problem is, the thing doesn't actually fit :P. I'll post pictures when I get a chance.