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Made-It-Myself Tri-Fold Doors
"When I built my 40-ft. wide Quonset hangar building, I saved a lot of money by building a pair of tri-fold doors for the end of the building," says Don Ickes, Osterburg, Penn.
The end of the building has three doors on each side. All together, there are 6 sections that fold out. The doors are made from the sam
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Made-It-Myself Tri-Fold Doors AG WORLD 31-1-25 "When I built my 40-ft. wide Quonset hangar building, I saved a lot of money by building a pair of tri-fold doors for the end of the building," says Don Ickes, Osterburg, Penn.
The end of the building has three doors on each side. All together, there are 6 sections that fold out. The doors are made from the same sheet metal used on the rest of the building and slide on a pair of conventional barn tracks. Each track covers just two doors. That's because the two inside doors are hinged and swing out.
"Commercial electric-powered overhead doors for a building this size would have cost about $8,000 whereas I spent only about $1,000," says Ickes. "My tri-fold doors aren't electric-powered but they work great. They're built on frames made from 2 by 4's and 2 by 6's. At the end of the second door, I made a bracket that runs inside the barn track, which I fabricated out of scrap metal. The other end of the door is supported by large hinges that fasten to the 6 by 6-in. corner posts on the pole building."
On a Quonset building there's nothing to hang the doors on, so Ickes got a used roof truss out of another large building and turned it upside down. Then he installed two steel beams at each corner of the building and mounted the truss on top of them. "Because the upside-down truss is top heavy, I ran a brace to each corner of the building and bolted it on. I also installed a brace in the middle. Then I bolted some 2 by 6's onto the truss and mounted the track on them. I bought the truss plates dirt cheap at a manufacturer's sale," says Ickes.
On the inside, the three doors are held in place at the bottom corner of each door by a 1/2-in. dia. steel pin. "The pin extends through a metal bracket that's fastened to each of the doors, and goes down into a 3/4-in. dia. galvanized pipe that's embedded in the cement floor," notes Ickes.
Contact: FARM SHOW Followup, Don Ickes, Rt. 1, Box 300A, Bowser Road, Osterburg, Penn. 16667 ph 814 276-3353 or 814 285-8452; dickes@Bedford.net; www.eaa-aircraft.com).
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