Clad Garage Doors
Royal Doors offers a big variety of panel designs, colours and customization options. But our customers, with a little help from the architects, are pushing the limits. And when you think that there is nothing more to be invented or designed an enquiry for something extraordinary comes.
One of such ‘exiles’ out of comfort zone was door cladding with different materials. Now it is in our standard product range. The most popular cladding material is Okoume plywood. Okoume is the most water-resistant sort of hardwood. We can engrave Okoume sheets to get the necessary image.
Clad Options
However, customers are asking for doors to be clad with different types of timber or façade sheets. The reason is to get uniform house design, to match listed building requirements, or just ‘I like it’. We face two main problems with the cladding materials supplied or specified by the customers.
Most importantly we have to combine cladding material with the panels. There are two different materials with different reactions to temperature and humidity. If combined into one structure they can cause unpredictable behavior. Furthermore, we have to get perfect matching of the cladding layout on the garage door with the cladding layout on the façade. There are lots of factory-made types of cladding materials. Usually, they manufacture sheets using composite materials, cement, metal, etc. Timber planks as a cladding material are very popular as well. Favorites are cedar and larch, but lately, pine and ash thermo-wood are gaining popularity.
Technical Solutions
Above all, there are few additional brain teasers to be sorted out – the cladding material thickness and weight. To retain perfect performance we have to make some changes in technical design.
Sometimes cladding material can weight up to 20 kg per sq. metre. So by cladding the garage door 6 metres wide and 2.4 metres high we add 288 kilograms of additional weight. Actually, it is more than the weight of the garage door itself.
Even more for our most demanding customers, we offer a ‘façade-flush’ design. Façade-flush means that the façade surface and the garage door surface are on the same plane. Sometimes looking at the house you can hardly spot where the garage door is. The whole façade looks like one uniform plane and the garage door is ‘visible’ only when it is open.
