A 41-year-old Q-Door bi-folding door still in daily use
How long should an industrial door last?
Reliability in an industrial door takes many forms. Hinges sized for decades of punishment. Motors that handle millions of opening cycles. But the best measure of reliability is a door that simply keeps going, year after year. Like the one in the picture above.
Squint and you can make out the silhouette of a 1985 Mazda 626. Christer Towestam, who built the workshop, had it striped on as advertising. When the striping came off years later, the rest of the door had faded so much in the sun that the outline is still there, reminding the people of Torsby of a car dealer who retired long ago.
Along the bottom edge sit a few dents that surely have stories attached, but nobody remembers when they happened, so we can only guess.
The plate confirms the year of installation.
Businesses have come and gone in the building since. The door is still there, 41 years after it went up. And it has no plans to retire any time soon.
Round the back of the old showroom are two more doors of the same age. Look closely and you will find the odd rust bloom here and there, but otherwise they are in better condition than the building they hang in.
fter 41 years in service it is hardly surprising to find some rust along the bottom edge. The hinges are in good shape and the paint is holding.
Fire station doors, 41 years on
These doors went in at Torsby Fire and Rescue Service in April 1985. In 2019 they were fitted with new seals and repainted, but they face south and the colour is dark, so the paint has faded a fair amount since.
The doors have been serviced to Torverk's programme, which is why they still work faultlessly. The mechanism driving them is engineered for 2.6 million opening cycles, so we expect them to stay where they are for years yet.
These bi-folding doors were installed at Torsby fire station in 1985.
More doors at Torsby fire station, installed in 1985 and refurbished in 2019.
A 37-year-old Q-Port in Karlstad
This door went into a tyre workshop in Karlstad in 1989, and for the past few years it has been the shop window of a car wash.
Along the bottom edge, constant damp and detergent are starting to take hold as small rust blooms under the blistering paint.
It is not pretty. Mechanically the door is still in good order, and the lads running the car wash have no plans to replace it.
By this point we had started using encapsulated hinges, which shield the metal from the weather.
Doors optimised for uptime, not for purchase price
Across industrial estates in central Sweden you can find Torverk doors that are thirty and forty years old and still working.
Most carry dents from minor collisions. But because the Q-Door FX is built and sized to take what the real world does to it, the doors carry on working year after year.
That comes down to our founder, Sven-Åke Sundberg, and his contempt for throwaway products. He wanted to build the most reliable doors it was possible to make, and that has guided our product development since 1962.
Every component is sized to take a beating, relentless wear and Nordic weather.
You could say our doors are optimised for the years they run, not the day they are bought.
Spread the cost of the doors above across all the years they have been in use, and it is hard to find a door that works out cheaper in the long run. Because the cheapest door is the one that never stops.