Fixing the microwave

A few days ago the microwave broke. This isn't your normal broke- kick to the curb short circuit but instead a simple design flaw- the handle broke off. Given the relative strength of plastics I'm very surprised that such a thing could happen- that is, until I tried to line up the broken pieces and realized the bottom half of the two part handle was compressed very tightly- so that repeated cookings under the grill must have stressed it to the point it broke.

Googling "spacesaver GE microwave broken handle" returned millions of hits, all bitching about how expensive the replacement part was- 60$+, and that if you needed to replace the front half of the door (plastic holding in the glass) you were looking at nearly the cost of a new microwave.

Great Fix, GE- I'll contribute to the comments by saying your microwave design is a POS and that, with thousands of customers pissed off at your crappy design, you'd think you could come up with a better design. May I suggest

1) An addition screw access hole to the front of the microwave.
2) Anchoring the handle to the metal internal frame instead of the cheap plastic front
3) reducing the 2 piece handle to a 1 piece handle with
4) ribbed / textured grip underneath that can expand/contract better
5) picking a better plastic to use that is less sensitive to heat
6) swapping out the handle with metal.
I chose to take a piece of spalted maple I had planed in the garage back when I was tearing about wood pallets and feeding them into my thickness planar / jointer / table saw. I had a nice piece about the right thickness to take a screw and be strong, and if worse came to worse I could always put a finishing screw on the outside, go thru the metal frame and washer / lock washer / locktight / nut the inside. Either way it would look good, be functional, and I wouldn't have to buy another bloody damn microwave at this point.

And it won't be a GE either.