Fire Pit Cover

This is a solid metal fire pit cover specially made for the dimensions of this fire pit. A fire pit cover is a necessary accessory. It keeps debris, rain, and animals from filling your fire pit. With in-ground fire pits, adding a cover also protects guests from falling into it and getting hurt by the dangerous things that might be left over from past fires.

The quantity of these materials will be completely dependent on the measurements of your specific firepit.

The types of materials you will need are steel sheet metal (the gauge is personal preference but thicker material will be more durable and last longer) and 5/16in- dia steel solid round rod.

The types of tools needed are an angle grinder, proper welding equipment, a vice with a bending bar (or whatever preferred method to bend the round rod, and high heat spray paint.

For a circular fire pit, the planning needs to be fully thought out because as you can see in this picture, if you don't make it big enough the sides won't fully cover the hole but where it comes to a point will. I made this mistake while I was making this project but decided the gap was small enough for me to live with.

The only measurement of your fire pit that is needed is the inside diameter of the hole. Once the inside diameter is taken you can start planning the dimensions of the skeleton of the cover.

I personally would suggest Starting the planning by figuring out what dimensions of the base hexagon should be by using an online hexagon calculator that will be able to show you the length from side to side, point to point, and the side length (hexagoncalculator.apphb.com is what I used). As you can see from figure 2 I plugged in the measurement 4' for the side to side and it calculated exactly how long each side length should be.

For this step, if you are not good at trig functions I would suggest the right triangle calculator by Calculator.net.

You will need to decide what height you prefer the peak of the cover to be above the base. Once that is decided on the calculator I used (figure 3) plug that height into the "a" value highlighted in blue and then take the center to vertex measurement from figure 2 and plug it into the "b" value highlighted in green. The calculator should give you the "c" value highlighted in yellow which is the length of the risers.

Start this step by cutting the round rod into six pieces with the angle grinder, they should be however long you calculated in step 2. Then lay out the pieces into the shape of the base and tack weld each corner into place before fully welding each corner. Next, you will cut 6 more pieces of round rod with the angle grinder at whatever length was decided in step 3. Those 6 pieces will have one end tack welded to each corner and the welded together where they meet at the peak, and once they have been tacked together you can fully weld all of the joints.

This step is where the sheets will come in. You should use the angle grinder to cut out 6 triangles that match each open pannel. Once those have been cut you can weld them onto the skeleton one piece at a time until they are all attached.

The handle is something that can be customized to anyone's preference. To start you will need a length of round rod around 16" long. You will then mark 5" from each side and using the vice and/or your preferred method of bending you will bend it around 90 degrees at the marks made, making a U shape. As you can see my handle is not a perfect 90-degree turn mainly because I thought it looked better this way. Next, you can weld it onto the cover preferably on the creases where the skeleton is.

This final step is not fully necessary but is highly suggested to increase durability.

Spray painting this with some high heat spray paint will not only make the cover less reflective but also protect it from rusting.