Making a custom ash pan for a fire grate from a shelf

We opened up the fireplace recently. We took out an old and way too narrow old fire surround and opened up the chimney void to show off the lovely old bricks.

To make the most of the newly expanded space, we also bought a nice big grate. This makes life so much easier when setting a fire. You can make a small fire or a great big one, easy peasy.

The grate we bought second hand and it had no ash pan. After scouring the Interweb for ages, it turned out that the only way to get a new ash pan that macthed for size and shape was to order a bespoke one. This would have cost more than a hundred quid.

So I made one instead.

Here it is open...

And in place.

Making this didn't seem too tricky a prospect. After all, it's just like making a cardboard box, only from metal! First up was to measure the size needed...

Using an unfolded cardboard box as inspiration, I designed the form I'd need to cut out of metal...

This was transferred to a nice heavy metal shelf, that I had collected from a skip a while back, in case I ever needed some strong sheet metal. That turned out to have been a canny foresight.

Another view. This is one of those folded section dexion-type shelves from an industrial unit.

The lines were drawn using a sharpie maker pen.

The cuts weer made with a metal-cutting disc in an angle grinder. The ends were folded first.

Thus...

After further cutting the long sides were folded up. The ends of these were cut long so they could be folded in to make bracing flaps.

Like so...

Once folded, the sides were held in a sash cramp ready for rivetting together. The clamp allowed the flaps to be precisely folded until the distance between them was exactly as designed.

Two G-cramps were used to pull the end flaps tight together before rivetting.

Then the joining flaps were rivetted together using 4mm blind rivets (pop rivets)

Each end had four rivets.

Thus...

The sides can distort a bit when putting it all together.

Nothing a hammer can't sort out though...

Then the same was done on the other end.

The basic pan was thus made.

Finally (and not shown here) I added a handle and spray painted it all in fireproof paint