Door and frame assemblies
Repair and service of extruded aluminum commercial entrances in Charlotte — racked leaves, drag on the threshold, hookbolt and deadlatch faults, surface and floor closers, offset pivots, and the alignment work that makes the rest of it hold. Call (333) 333-3333.
At a glance
Compare this against the other three leaf assemblies or read the standards reference.
Door and frame assemblies
An aluminum entrance leaf is four extrusions held square by mechanical corner joints, and everything the door does depends on those joints staying square. They are not welded. They are screwed, clipped or tie-rodded, and every cycle works them a little. A storefront entrance at a South End restaurant will take more cycles between Thanksgiving and New Year than a mechanical room door takes in a decade, and the joints are where that arithmetic shows up.
So when an aluminum entrance starts dragging on one corner, the floor has not moved and the hinge has not worn — the leaf is no longer a rectangle. You can see it: check the gap along the top rail and it will be wider at one end than the other. That single measurement separates a truing job from a closer job, and it takes about fifteen seconds.
Detail
Manual aluminum entrances: single leaves, pairs, and the inner and outer lines of a vestibule. Anything with a sensor header, a swing operator or a slider belongs to an automatic door contractor and we will tell you that on the phone rather than after the visit.
Bringing the corners back to square and re-tensioning the joint. There is a real limit to how many times a leaf can be trued before the extrusion itself is worked out, and part of the job is saying when that point has been reached rather than taking the money again.
The latching hardware on narrow-stile entrances, and the strike alignment that is usually the actual complaint. A bright polished wear mark on one edge of the strike face tells you the leaf is presenting low or high, which is a truing problem wearing a latching costume.
Standard on aluminum entrances and rarely understood by whoever inherited the building. A leaf that has started to drop or bind is usually a worn bottom pivot, or a floor closer whose cement case has taken on water. Floor closer work means lifting the leaf out, which is worth knowing before the visit rather than after.
An exterior entrance fights wind load and building stack pressure. A closer sized for an interior door gets forced past its arm geometry or cranked up until it becomes its own problem. Under ANSI/BHMA A156.4 a Grade 1 closer is cycle tested to 2,000,000 cycles, so a Grade 1 unit failing in two years is a sizing or mounting problem, not a product problem.
Visible daylight under an entrance is a call people postpone for years while paying to condition the air going out through it. On an exterior opening the threshold is also structural to the alignment of the assembly — loosened threshold fixings let the leaf sit differently, and that shows up as a latching complaint two weeks later.
| Variable | Why it matters |
|---|---|
| Truing versus replacing the leaf | A leaf that can be brought back to square is a visit. A leaf that has been trued too many times is a new leaf, and new leaves on old storefront systems have lead time. |
| Surface closer or floor closer | One is worked from a step ladder. The other means lifting the leaf out of the opening and opening the floor case. |
| Whether the threshold is in scope | Hardware alone is a visit. Threshold work puts the opening out of service for part of a day and changes how the leaf sits. |
No figures appear in that table and none appear anywhere on this site, because a price quoted before anybody has seen the opening is a number somebody ends up unhappy about. Those are the variables that decide it.
Why us
It is fifteen seconds and it decides whether the job is alignment or hardware. Skipping it is how an entrance gets four closers in six years.
There is a point past which truing is taking your money to buy three months. We would rather say so.
Two door lines with a pocket of air between them interact — adjust the outer and the inner changes behaviour, because the pressure across each leaf shifts. A vestibule serviced one line at a time by different people over a decade is a recognisable and fixable mess.
Exterior, wind-loaded and stack-pressured openings get sized as exterior openings. Not as whatever was on the van.
Process
Dragging, not latching, slamming, will not stay shut. Whichever one it is.
Two questions. They separate alignment from hardware before anyone drives out.
Gap at head, both jambs, and the diagonal on the leaf.
Hardware gets adjusted after the leaf is a rectangle again, not before. Adjusting hardware to a racked leaf is how you get a door that works for a fortnight.
Then check it latches from a dead stop without being pulled.
Sweep and latch speed, and the opening force checked on an accessible route. Then we cycle it twenty times and check it again.
Tell us which corner catches and whether the top gap is even. That is most of the diagnosis.
