Best Cheap Hanger Door I have ever seen

The owner of the airport I hanger at has figured out the most ingenuous hanger door system I have ever seen. He ordered garage door panels and parts from a distributor, embedded the track into the concrete floor, and it looks like he used ag track and trolleys for the top, and had the rounded corners custom fabricated. One end door is used as a man door.

 

Is there winter where this is installed?

 

That's spiffy. And those doors can sometimes be gotten cheaply as seconds.
- It would be more complicated with a T-hangar, since the front walls typically aren't as long as the doors. So, maybe another turn.
- I'd want the bottom track to be something that wouldn't fill up with dirt and ice, maybe he did that.
-I'd miss the storage on those walls.

But cheap can be good.

 

No, its outside Houston. However, I pretty sure that they sell insulated garage doors. I have one on my house.

 

Our hangars have the same curved track on top, but the doors are hanging, suspended on rollers inside those tracks. So when you open or close the doors you have to make sure the doors do not swing outward on the bottom. There is no lower track embedded or bolted to the ground.

Your door in the photos looks a little more luxurious than what we have here, and we're paying over 2X what you're paying. Be thankful

Then again, we don't have Category 5 hurricanes in Los Angeles !

 

A company used to build doors like that for hangars. I think I still have a brochure. Can't put anything along the inside walls of you hangar that will interfere with the door operation so it would never work for me.

 

Ask your garage door company about a sliding center mullion system.

Basically 2 standard doors, lift em up then slide the center post out of the way.

They used them a lot up north on the tent structure hangars.

 

That’s great of you can find a couple of 20’ tall double wide garage doors.

 

That's the neat thing about the modular design of a garage door. There is no limit to the number of sections that can be stacked on.

 

That’s nice.

 

One of those doors on our field. Use the rollup 20' door for auto's, etc and when you want both 20' doors open , just swing the center mullion side ways and it comes loose at the top and move over to the side to store with both door open. Works good.

 

Put the tracks a little out from the wall, you can have shelves and the doors. Yeah, you can't access the shelves when the doors are open.

 

Work great when run manually by a non idiot type ours were electric with remotes and the interlock switches on occasion got screwy. Center mullion was on a massive opener like at home. Doors were on chain drives. Pretty swanky. All contactors and relays, old school so even i understood it.

 

I think the doors are only 12ft tall. Remember, they are hanging vertically instead of horizontally. As he bought strait from a distributor he only had to purchase number of panels, and hardware he needed. He ordered the panels for his personal hanger with some windows! If I ever get to build I hanger, I will do the exact same thing.

 

Y'all forgive my lack of familiarity please, I had to go look up Mullions.

Here's an idea. Can you take advantage of the pre-fab cheap garage door panels, and join them together into a pair of two larger panels, the use those panels as a bi-fold door?

 

The framing that supports them is the expensive part. SIPS (foam sandwiched by thin steel) are much cheaper than garage doors. Its the big bifold/clamshell hardware thats painfully expensive - but in a lot of places you need the engineering stamp for the windloading so...

 

That is the problem with the arrangement in the OP; they won’t come close to withstanding the wind loading needed here, and probably anywhere else.


BJC

 

I find that hard to believe, that would mean that every garage door wouldn't meet the wind loading requirements.

 

But here they are installed in nonstandard tracks in a nonstandard orientation, not in accordance with the mfgr's instructions. Without an engineer's stamp, you'll be on your own in battling the insurance company when they blow off and bash up the King Air parked on the ramp.

 

Take a look at the photos in the OP. The panels lack the reinforcing beam necessary to meet wind loading requirements when installed in a garage. The mounting of the upper railing is suspect too.

Not trying to be overly critical of the concept, but I know too many people who have lost airplanes due, to scrimping on hangar construction, not to comment here. If your HBA airplane is valuable to you, hangar it in a building built, and maintained, to code. If a spam can, at least insure it appropriately.


BJC

Edit: We’ve had this discussion here; use the search feature to find it. Oops ....