Light leaking Jotul - orange stripe below top plate

I have a newish Jotul Firelight F600 CB (installed March 2010). Anytime the temperature is climbing, such as at startup or reloads, a gap opens up between the top plate and the front plate that shows up as an orange stripe. I can feel the gap with my finger when it is warming from a cold start and it feels like maybe 2 mm. After I back the air down and the temperature of the stove settles in at whatever it is going to be at for a while, the visible gap goes away. The stove is too hot to touch at that point so I can't say for sure if any gap remains, but I can't see light coming out.

I mentioned this in another thread (titled "Whistling f600") recently and received advice from one person to caulk it up with some high temp caulk and from another to contact the dealer since this is unacceptable quality control. (Thank you to both who wrote.) I didn't want to hijack that thread and so am posting the pics of it here and asking what others think.

The stove has definitely never been overfired or abused and the gap has been there since I started using it.

I may not be up a lot later tonight, so if this generates some responses I will check in the morning. Thanks.

I have removed the cookplate (the part with the decorative shell) once but have never taken the entire top plate off. I assumed that this was cemented in place. Are you saying that it bolts on? If so I would have to wait until morning when the stove is cool enough to get inside it and work on it.
The pics are a good enough resolution that clicking on them helps a little with the perspective.

Mad Tom - The oval piece you are talking about is the one I am calling the cookplate. That is easily removed by loosening two nuts within the stove and it is my understanding that on european models it simply rests in place with gravity. The gap on my stove has nothing to do with the oval plate but rather with the rectangular top plate that meets the front, back, and side plates that make up the vertical surfaces of the stove. This is the plate that the oval plate rests upon.

Thanks for the input and for noting that no such gap is there on your stove.

Wahoowad - That sounds like some good advice. I looked inside the stove a little this morning before I saw your post. I could see a nut and bolt on either side and possibly an allen head bolt on the front. I couldn't look too closely because it was still a little warm and had coals. I did a careful inspection around the outside of the top plate and found no other gaps, just the long one in front which is still there when the stove is not hot. I can see gasket material through the gap when I look with a flashlight. Unfortunately, as I look at the top plate it seems to have a slight upward bow in the area of the gap.

I don't know why I didn't think to do this earlier but I just now layed a straight edge E/W across the front edge of the top plate. There is a definite upward bow in the top plate. If the straight edge touches the front center of it, the ends are about 3/16" below that. Laying the straight edge N/S along the left and right sides of the top plate shows that it is level in those areas, but laying it E/W across the back of the top plate shows that it also bows upward there.

With such a distict upward bow, I think I will not bother with the resetting but will just call the dealer on Monday.

Since my last post I was able to look inside the cool stove and saw that the front center bolt that holds down the top plate was missing. Because of the permanent upward bow in the top plate, it was my feeling that the top plate needs to be replaced.

Yesterday a stove tech guy looked at it and agreed with me. He said that he would be contacting the Jotul rep for a warranty replacement of the top plate and would be in touch with me. He did put a bolt loosely in place in the meantime and that has actually stopped the orange glow when the temperature is rising, but a less visible gap is still there.

I'll never know if the bolt was not installed at the factory or whether it fell out during crating/shipping, but it makes me think that this should be an item to check on any new Jotul stove. It would only take a minute for a dealer (or purchaser, if this information was in the manual) to check to see if all of the necessary nuts and bolts are in place, and could avoid a much bigger problem down the road.

The tech warned me that because of the majolica brown enamel finish it could take a while to get a new top plate, but I'll post again when the repair is made.

Thanks to everyone for your input!

Shari - If you look back through the thread you will see that the bolts in question are not those holding the oval cooktop, but rather the ones holding the rectangular top plate to the vertical plates that make up the sides of the stove.

I agree that there would be no problem in leaving the nuts off of the oval cooktop. Gravity alone would be fine for that.

While it is possible that the top plate came from the factory warped, it is my hunch that it warped as a result of being securely bolted at the sides and back but not at the front center. When heated it simply bowed upward in the unattached area. If no bolts at all were used, or just one side was bolted I'm guessing it would not have warped, but being fixed at the sides and not in the middle likely caused the problem. I have no way to know this for sure, but it is my best guess as to what happened based on what I have observed of the stove.

I can definitively say that the stove has never even been close to being overfired. In fact, it's never been over 575 degrees. I usually start throttling back between 500 and 530 and let it cruise there and run down until reload. Since we got the stove in March we just haven't had need to run it hotter than that. The coldest we've had this December is a few nights of -2 degrees.

Also, again for clarity to those new to this thread, I am not referring to the oval "cooktop" plate which has one bolt on either side and I believe is identical on the F600 and F500 and can just rest in place without the bolts. This oval plate drops into the rectangular top plate. The problem is with the rectangular top plate. It seems to me that that plate could also rest in place with no bolts at all, but is intended to have four attachment points, one at each side.

I should add that my explaination for the warping is based partly on the assumption that it is hard to imagine quality control at Jotul being so bad as to have let a top plate with so much bow in it out the factory door.