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.
