Hardware Installation

This Chevron Food Mart near Tigard has two aluminum doors with what are called “header-hidden door-closers.” One of the common problems with header-hidden door…

…closers has to do with the fulcrum-point that allows the door panel to exert extreme amounts of leverage that result in hyperextending the closer and thus damaging it.

Even closer-designs that attempt to offset the fulcrum-point with the use of an arm, such as this Husky brand closer, are still frequently damaged by this limitation of physics.

This damage often results in doors not closing all the way, among other symptoms. And so it is that this flawed design has resulted in much work coming our way. But rather than merely putting the same product design back to be damaged over and over…

…again, we thought it might better serve our clients if we were to come up with a solution to the problem. And so it is that the original closer that is hidden up in the header-jamb is disengaged from the door by removing the arm.

And for the door models wherein the header-hidden closer doubles in function as a top pivot-hinge, the closer is replaced with a dummy closer where the hydraulics have been removed, leaving only the pivot-hinge function. The closing aspect of the original closers are then replaced with the typical surface-mount type…

…of hydraulic door closer that not only employs much more reasonable fulcrum points, but offers the added benefit of a “back-check” feature wherein the hydraulics are used to cushion and stop the door from being hyperextended and damaged when caught by the wind or an angry patron. We call this a “closer conversion.”