If you have be the owner of an automatic door for more than a hot minute you likely have experienced the tragedy and reality of every automatic door when good parts go bad.
But often out of sight is out of mind when it comes to wearable parts. Until the pivots, guides, or wheels begin making noise, tearing up the bottom track, causing the door to jam, shudder, and generally causing the door to run poorly, it never occurs to owners to have their door inspected before things get this far gone.
I always found pictures of the worn parts helped me realize what was happening “behind the scenes” of the door.
Here are a couple examples techs shared with me, showing how bad guides allowed to stay in the door can damage the door further.
Above you can see wheels worn flat! This causes drag on the doors and excess strain on the motor, then the doors won’t line up right, and can scrape the metal and finish. Plus is sounds terrible!
This photo is what a worn forked bottom guide did to the track because it was not replaced soon enough. A less expensive, quick door repair turned into a more costly, more labor heavy repair.
Below you can see a slider that had a bad guide, and it was ignored until it wore itself into the bottom tracks and started cutting a groove. Further delay disrupted the door’s movement so that it ground itself into the bottom of the sidelight, cutting through the aluminum and leaving a pile of metal shavings behind. In the end the costly repair required ordering new metal, pulling the glass out, and taking apart the panels to replace them, as well as replace the bottom tracks. All because that first bad guide was let go.
As you can see from all these pictures, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. As Spring approaches consider scheduling an annual inspection to catch those parts before they go bad.
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