Just sort of felt like sharing, vis-a-vis custom oven steels.
Last week i bought a new countertop oven to replace my ailing, overpriced cuisinart toaster oven. For small bakes. If I'm baking a full 13" pullman loaf or other large foods, I will bite the bullet and use the gas oven in the summer, and it will make it 90f in my kitchen. I could do a 9" loaf, a half size detroit style, 10" pan pizzas, small pans of other baked goods, etc, in the old one, but the elements are going out.
I ended up settling on the nuwave bravo xl, which allows a technically inclined user to specify how much of the heat comes from the top or the bottom, goes to 500f, and claims to accommodate a 13" pizza. The biggest criticism is that the user interface is pretty technical. I am myself pretty technical. It is also, of course, despite marketing to the contrary, not nearly an air fryer. Just an oven that offers some anemic convection.
The racks turn out to be 14.75" wide and 12" deep. There is another 1" bump-out in a 12-inch-wide circular arc at the back.
I don't really want a stone at that temperature, let alone a round one. I don't want a round 13" steel, even if i could get one. My hand-stretched crusts are too close to that dimension and it sounds like more hassle than it is worth to not have the extra realestate of a vaguely rhomboid surface.
Piece of cake to draw the ideal shape in a cad program.
send-cut-send and most of their major competitors came in at about $70 shipped for a 1/4" steel that is 14 inches wide, straight across one long side, and has a 12x1" circular arc out the other long side, for a 13" pizza with room for mistakes.
3/16" would save about $10. At any rate, sending it out saves an hour or more of shaping metal with an angle grinder, now that i don't have casual access to an abrasive waterjet.
Even then, i wonder if I'd spend more than $20 running the now-defunct makerspace's waterjet to cut that size out of 1/4", and how much would the stock cost me, even at the by-the-pound weights of the remnants racks? I'd have to buy a piece much larger than 13x14. I checked the racks today.
The cheapest "custom baking steel" I found said they start at $80.
One of the two laser cutting shops within a few minutes of me (I realize the "silicon slopes" are not a normal market) quoted me $60 and change if i come pick it up myself. Again, going to 3/16 would save about $10 but that doesn't feel worth it.
That price includes "deburring" which sounds from the description that they push the edges into a wire wheel, which is fine. not sure what a machine shop would charge me to media blast it. I don't have my own blasting setup. I expect not more than $10. Then again, I am inclined to just run a wire cone across it, scrub it with barkeeper's friend, and season it.
