Door installation and repair in Brantford

18-gauge face sheets are the commercial standard, with 16-gauge used where traffic or abuse is heavy and 20-gauge limited to light interior duty. Frames run the other way: 16-gauge is the usual interior frame and 14-gauge the exterior and heavy-duty one. Lower number, thicker steel. The ANSI/SDI A250.8 levels are the shorthand the trade uses — Level 1 through Level 4, standard duty to maximum duty.

In rough order of how often we are called for them: sensors that have drifted, been knocked or been blinded by sunlight or a new floor finish; dirty or worn rollers and tracks on a slider, which show up as a door that shudders or stalls; failed or misadjusted safety beams that leave the door stuck open or reversing at random; belts, motors and control boards at the end of their life; and damage from something that hit the door. The single most common underlying cause is not the operator at all — it is a building change nobody connected to the entrance, like a new mat, a new sign or a re-tiled floor.

The most common commercial swing door is a 3′0″ × 7′0″ single leaf, with pairs made up to 8′0″ wide, and 8′0″-tall leaves used where equipment has to pass. Overhead, dock and rolling doors are sized to the opening rather than to a standard, so they are measured on site. If you are matching an existing door, send us a photo and the rough opening dimensions and we will confirm.

A storefront system is the glazed wall at the front of a building, made as one assembly: extruded aluminum framing anchored into the opening, glass set into that framing, and one or more aluminum entrance doors hung in it. It sits inside a single storey and is anchored to the opening around it, which is what separates it from a curtain wall — a curtain wall runs past the floor slabs and hangs off the building structure instead.

How far the system spans, and what carries it. A storefront sits inside one storey, anchored into the opening — the ground-floor glazing on a shop or office. A window wall spans slab to slab, one storey at a time, and bears on the floor slab. A curtain wall runs continuously past the slab edges over multiple floors and is hung off the building structure. The framing gets deeper and the anchoring more engineered in that order, which is why the same-looking elevation can be three different products with three different prices.

Mostly the building decides. A sectional door needs headroom above the opening for the horizontal track, and it insulates well, which makes it the usual choice for heated buildings and dock positions. A rolling steel door needs very little headroom because it coils into a barrel, it is tough and it is secure, which makes it the answer where there is structure in the way or where the opening needs to resist attack. If you have headroom and want insulation, sectional. If you do not, rolling.