Miscellaneous

Downtown Vancouver, Washington.

A couple very old double-acting center-hung single-entry aluminum storefront doors. Note the concave shaped jamb-stop with the corresponding convex edges of the door.

That’s a relatively interesting way to hide the gaps between the doors and their respective vertical jamb-legs, but one of the biggest tenant complaints was the cold-air blowing in around these doors. So our proposal was to pull the floor-hidden hydraulic door closers, as seen above…

…and reinstall the doors as strictly out-swing versions, which necessitated moving the doors from the center of the jamb, out to the exterior most edge of the jamb.

Continuous hinges are one of the high-traffic commercial door products of the century.

The floor-hidden hydraulic door closers that we removed, where replaced with surface-mount Hager 5100 series hydraulic door closers installed in a “parallel-arm configuration.” Much more adjustable and dependable, with the added benefit of what they call “Back-Check,” which is almost an absolute necessity for commercial outswing doors. Back check helps cushion the door when it gets caught by the wind.

The new weather-stripping products of choice were the Pemko 2815 perimeter gasketing, which we chose because we needed a product that could double as a jamb-stop of sorts, with its 7/16″ overlap, which we shimmed out with aluminum flat-bar to acquire the needed dimensional relationship to the door-faces on the top and side. Pemko 18061 brush-type door-bottom weather-strip for the door sweep.

Some needed reinforcement for the deadbolt.

These two storefront doors with their single-pane glass and related storefront structure have many miles on them, in a manner of speaking.

The owner indicated that this commercial building had been in their family since it was built, and keeping the original doors was important to them. Not only did they save some money over having to purchase new doors, but they will also likely have many more years of trouble-free use.