A forklift crashing into your overhead door makes your normal workday feel as if it is about to come to a screeching halt. This would be true with most warehouse doors, but not with a rubber door. With the resilience of rubber combined with the breakaway system PerforMax Global uses, you will rarely have to worry about your door in various applications and situations. The detrimental damage your traditional steel or aluminum door would suffer can be a worry of the past.
Is an Overhead Steel Door Safe?
There are a lot of factors to consider when buying or replacing an overhead door for your facility: cost, downtime, functionality, the time it takes for installation, lifetime of the door, and several additional factors. Whether or not your commercial door is impactable becomes a key factor that many don’t consider. A rolling steel door covers your basics; sturdy, functional, and less costly. While that may seem like the simple and easy solution at the time, it is not a long-term solution for door functionality.
One of the most common reasons people get their steel doors replaced is due to door collision and broken springs. Hitting a steel-type door with a forklift, bus, or truck can break those doors, either by getting stuck in place, or not being able to open. An accident like that can leave your facility in disarray until the door is fixed, causing downtime from waiting for a service company. This can lead to an expensive bill from the cost of the repair and decreased productivity. A traditional warehouse door is only a short-term fix and with long-term repetitive repair costs. Installing a high-performance rubber door is the solution to minimizing your downtime.
Maybe you can wait a day for a repairman to come and fix your commercial door, or you may have to order an emergency fix and pay much more. That’s where an impactable rubber door comes into play. There won’t be that feeling in the pit of your stomach when you hear someone hit your rubber door, as you can instead continue on your day without costly downtime.
What Happens to an Overhead Steel Door in a Collison?
What Do I Do When A Forklift Crashes Into my Overhead Steel Door?
Forklifts may not seem that damaging to doors at first glance. They’re small and don’t usually go over 10 MPH at max speed. Perhaps the real damage would come from the forks piercing your door. The surprise is that your forklifts weigh nearly twice as much as a pickup truck in order to carry heavy loads. Imagine 9,000 pounds crashing into your door at 5 MPH. Suddenly that seems a lot more damaging. Add on a few more thousand pounds for the load your forklift carrying, and it may total 12,000 pounds. In total, that comes to 24,332 Newtons or 5470 pounds of force into that steel door. With that amount of force, you might need to purchase an entirely new door.
Let’s say this door was rolled up most of the way and the forklift crashed into the bottom of the door. That is 5,470 pounds impacting the bottom and can break the door immediately. Depending on the width of the door, this impact can greatly affect the guides as well, leading to further problems. Once guides for any door are broken or bent, it needs replacement. Rigid doors are secured in their guides and often can’t function once they are damaged. We also run into the issue of safety after such an impact, namely a door free-falling following a collision. Take a look at this video to see what even a small free-falling door can do. Safety issues may not appear immediately, meaning the collision area is unsafe until fixed. This can lead to the need for costly emergency repair if the door is salvageable. This scenario is entirely avoidable with a rubber door from PerforMax Global.
What Happens to a Rubber Door in a Collison?
Rubber is an incredibly versatile material. In the example of our doors, we can look at its high stretch ratio, resilience, and how impactable it is. The science behind why rubber is so resilient is described easily with a pile of bricks.
Rubber molecules are in disorder when relaxed, as the pile of bricks not stacked together. Once the rubber is stretched and needs to work, it forms into the wall of bricks. Once the rubber is stretched by any means, it snaps back to its original size and shape. With a metal-type door, there’s no room for it to snap back into place, the brick wall gets knocked into a pile of bricks and stays there. That’s just how natural rubber works, but when we add a little bit of chemistry, rubber becomes even stronger. Vulcanization is a process where those molecule strands become even stronger. A cross-link bond forms between all of the strands of molecules to strengthen their bonds.
The rubber doors from PerforMax Global are designed to break away from the guides when collided. This means neither your door nor guides will take heavy damage. The rubber curtain will move with the impact and your guides are unaffected thanks to our design. We have such extraordinary confidence in our curtains that they come with a limited lifetime warranty. If your rubber curtain rips after a collision, we will replace it for you. That’s why you can depend on our rubber doors.
It’s hard to find a more convenient door on the market that meets the reliability and versatility of a PerforMax Global rubber door. There are more great benefits of rubber doors you can read about in our Rubber vs. Steel page. We take pride in our impactable doors their safety, cost savings, and warranty which makes them the high-performance door your facility needs. Browse our videos to see our impactable doors in action. If you want to see how our doors operate in person, you can request a mobile showroom at your facility. Alleviate future downtime and costly repairs with a PerforMax Global high-performance rubber door.