How a 4 panel electric garage door is made

As you have been investigating purchasing a garage door you will have seen that they come in all manner of styles, operating systems, colours and sizes. They are generally made from either steel or aluminium due to their high tolerance to the elements and harsh climates, but you can still find some garage doors made from wood or even vinyl.

What you may not know is how a garage door is made, so here we will take a look at how a four panelled aluminium electric garage door is made. This is the type of door used for an automated sectional garage door that retracts above and behind the garage's door opening.

Example – a raised panel aluminium garage door – typical of a sectional door

The process begins with a continuous sheet of aluminium that is painted on one side with a layer of flexible polyester paint which is then baked onto the aluminium. This is the side of the garage door that will be showing externally.

Some garage doors have a texture such as a simulated wood grain. In order to get this design the aluminium passes through rollers which have the design imprinted onto them. As our particular garage door has raised panels the aluminium is then passed through a press which pushes the aluminium panel into the design of our choosing.

The aluminium sheet next passes through a machine which cuts the metal into the necessary garage door width and, at the same time, another machine folds over the edges to create a joint where the two sides of the panel will be attached.

The next stage is to attach metal reinforcing plates to the back of the panel in the areas into which the handles, hinges and brackets for the electric mechanism will be placed. These are attached using a hot glue method. As this particular garage door is going to be insulated using polyurethane foam it is at this stage that a hole is drilled into the side of the panel to enable the foam to be injected.

Two sheets are now joined together to make one panel section. The open ends of the panel are filled with a block of wood which is then nailed to the panel. Each panel is next marked with the location of the metal plates so that the installing engineer knows the area in which to screw the necessary hinges and handles. At the same time safety information stickers are attached to the panel.

At this point the panel is still very flexible as the insulation foam has not yet been injected between the two sheets, so prior to the injection process a bar is attached to the long lengths of each panel to make it more rigid and stable. These bars are removed once the insulation foam has hardened.

The panels are now taken to be injected with insulation foam. As mentioned previously this is polyurethane foam which expands into all areas of the panel and once dry provides a rigid solid core to the panel. As polyurethane foam, once dry, is an extremely light form of insulation, it does not add any unnecessary weight to the garage door.

Once the insulation has dried the long metal bars are removed and the panel moves to the next stage. Here various components are attached to the panel such as a rubber weather seal that will prevent rain and cold winds entering the garage through the bottom of the door.

If you have chosen to have windows in the top panel of your garage door it is at this point that windows are installed. Before a window can be placed into the panel the area in which it will be positioned needs to be removed using a router. The window is installed into the panel and is secured using a PVC frame which, like the seal around the bottom of the door, also prevents cold air and rain from penetrating through into the garage.

Before any garage door leaves the factory all the fixings are placed into a box and everything is now packaged and sent to the supplier to await installation.