Italian style pizza oven

I have completed the fire poker and oven grate for my dear clients down in North Georgia. They have been quite patient while I took time out of the shop to work on the problem with our dam. Now I have finally gotten back out to the shop to begin work on their "pizza oven" door. The set-up is a large stacked stone fireplace located outdoors. The fireplace is centered and on one side is an oven operate by placing hot coals from the fire into the oven.
This is the oven!

I started by cutting and sizing an insert frame that will be attached to the masonry. I am basing the sizing off of measurements I took onsite so everything should fit just perfectly when the piece arrive at it's new home.

There are two little brackets that will hold two pieces of chain to the frame.These chain pieces will support the door. This is the bracket. 

These are two links of chain.

I also cut out the door and textured it yesterday. Only the edges will be textured because there is another piece that covers the middle of the steel door. I cut the plate out of 3/16" plate steel.

The rectangle drawn on the plate designates where the center piece will cover the plate.

I used a 4-inch cutting disk to cut this out of a larger piece of metal. I think I got my money's worth out of the one I used! (Pictured is a new one and the used one.)

I threw the piece of plate metal into the forge. (Actually I laid it in the forge because it is too heavy and cumbersome to throw.)

I spent several hours texturing the outside and the texture turned out great. However, there was a lot of heat distortion in the piece of plate. I should have recognized and forseen the problem before I spent all afternoon texturing the piece, but I sturbornly persisted. At the end I started trying to forge the heat distortion out, but to no avail. Long story short, the first door gets trashed and I am cold texturing a second door that will be the actuall door that the clients receive. You may be thinking, "aww a little heat distortion? what's the big deal?" Well, take a look at the pictures and you will see!

The plate is warped in BOTH planes. If it was only in one plane it would be simple to forge out but with both planes being distorted, I do not have the equipment to fix this door. I would have to heat the entire plate up evenly and the use a large roller to reflatten the plate.

It is frustrating of course to have a part of a project fail in the first attempt, but that is part of the fun of blacksmithing. Each unique job I get is a learning experience for me. One thing I learned from an extremely knowledgeable smith is ALWAYS do a test piece. In this instance it would be impossible to do a test piece, but I should have identified the problem in the first ten minutes and chosen a different method.

Another couple of notches up for me on the the blacksmithing experience scale!