Completed MBC Retrofit

Hi Kevin and Matt, I hope you both enjoyed your TD! I love this oven (MBG) and the pizza has been a huge hit with family and friends. Its so much fun cooking in it as It makes me feel like a young chef again using a combi-oven for the first time!

Now that I’ve had about 12 fires with some great pizzas I’ve had some thoughts about a retro-fit. In the Oven Plans for the MBG step F calls for a piece of angle iron to create a top ledge lowering the opening several inches.
I realize I can’t take the oven apart and install this. I did have some thoughts, questions, and ideas.
I found online the Old West Iron Company and they had some cool oven door systems. Those could work however they mostly had hinged doors with a piece of iron or steel across the bottom requiring you to lift the pie over that piece to remove from the oven.

In a perfect world I would like to find an insert without a bottom brace, no hinged door, It would slide in following the arch of the oven and have a flange that would cover the inside corner of the barrel and create a ledge a few inches down from the top creating a ledge much like as shown in in step F of the MBG plans. And while I’m at it this insert would allow for the existing door that came with the package fits within it creating a seal. So I guess the question is…am I completely out of my mind?

You are not. (And yes, enjoyed Thanksgiving very much indeed! Even got to share my oven with an in-law who was aching to try his own pizza dough recipe in our oven!)

To get some ideas about how you could do what you’re wanting, search “custom door” on these boards. We’ve had a number of discussions about this over the years, and there are plenty of photos and links and ideas. None of them may be exactly what you want to do, but every thread started because someone else couldn’t find exactly what they wanted to do.

For what it’s worth, your initial idea is sound, in my opinion. I think that in concept it sounds like the sort of job a blacksmith would do, either using a template or on-site. When you think about it, what you’re describing is very similar to what smiths do when they fabricate a horseshoe.

Thanks Matt…will do!

1 Like