Oven Repair I

Moving along, the next item suffering is the oven. There are two faults, a broken button on the control panel and a failed seal on the top oven/grill. The oven is a Zanussi ZGC551GXC gas oven.

I started with the seal, just because this should be the easiest one to sort, in access terms at the very least.

Broken top oven door gasket

Removing the damaged seal was not a problem, it was held on with 4 hooks at each corner. So the whole thing just pulled out easily. The next part of the job was to get a bucket of hot soapy water and start cleaning both the stuff as it came off the oven and the exposed areas left behind.

Rear view of removed gasket 

You can see from the picture that the top portion of the seal has had more heat damage than the bottom which why it has parted there.

A quick trip to the Zanussi support pages yielded no information. Not even a link to their on-line parts shop where all the part diagrams, part numbers and prices are! So a replacement seal would have been £21 plus £2 p&p and another £8 for a replacement timer button, or £31 for the pair. The seal is only mildly expensive compared to button which costs its weight in 9 carat gold. Time to make do and mend I think...

Cross-section of door gasket

On inspection I found that gasket was originally sealed by inserting a joining piece into a void running the length of the gasket. It seemed that I could just replicate this. As I wasn't sure how hot the gasket would get in operation I plumped for a piece of thick aluminium foil folder over.

Foil from top of coffee can

Folded across a wire to make require profile

Using this and a piece of wire to form the spike in the profile I made a 4 inch piece to join the ends.

Home-made joining segment

As you can see from the photo, this was only partially successful as the perished rubber had a tendency to part. When I refitted the gasket to the door the aluminium kept slipping out of the rubber so to prevent this and deal with the perishing I reinforced it with four staples underneath the flap of the gasket.



Repair reinforced with staples

This worked and the whole thing went back into place with no problems.

Repaired and refitted top oven gasket

The less damaged part of the seal is now at the top of the oven aperture and hopefully we'll get a further 4 years of service out of it before it needs properly replaced. On to the snapped button!

Time spent : Day split over an afternoon and morning
Cost : £0.00