I love aviation but this kind of stuff is what keeps me from being an owner. My buddy has a Baron that between updating the avionics panel and the "annual" he hasn't been able to fly it for nearly 8 months. Crazy.

This is why buying that 22 is such a good idea. You need a stress relief. lol

quote:

Originally posted by slosig:

How often do you lube the hinges?

The previous guy who serviced them recommended inspection, lube, etc. at six to twelve month intervals, depending on how frequently the door is operated. The maintenance hangar across the taxiway is opened and closed five or six days / week. Our hangar not so much, maybe eight or ten times / month.

After a few scheduled days that turned out to be no-shows, work resumed today.

In this photo, the door is being supported by a 10,000 lb. forklift while the repair guy is removing the remnants of a broken hinge.

Two days after the previous photo. Enough of the top hinges have been replaced, that the door is now supported properly and the big fork lift is no longer required. The guy on the scissor lift is removing more of the old hinges, preparing to weld new hinges in place.

You can see my delivery truck inside the hangar, where it has been held captive for a bit over a month while we were unable to open the door. The welder guy assures me that we will be able to get the truck out by end of business tomorrow.

The outer skin panels have been removed and the old insulation stripped; they will have new insulation when they are re-attached.

If you can post a vid of the door in operation, that would be cool! Congrats, BTW…

quote:

Originally posted by erj_pilot:

If you can post a vid of the door in operation, that would be cool!

That will be a two-person operation, one to operate the door, the other to take the video. Then I'll have to figure out how to post a video. But that's all premature as they have not finished the job yet. They worked until almost 10:30pm last night (they had work lights and a generator), and were back on the job at 8:15am this morning, to meet their commitment to have the door sufficiently operational to get the delivery truck out by end of business today, for a dark-thirty a.m. departure for a trip to customers tomorrow morning.

Heck, even Juan Brown can't catch a break...

Rumor hazzit that hanger doors were designed by jealous engineers who could not get an Airman Certificate. So be careful, they pilots.

V-Tail,

Out of my own curiosity, why not opt for a sliding door? Would seem easier to maintain and not near as complex of an assembly.

You’d have to have room on the sides. At a lot of airports, that would block the neighboring hangers. At a lot of air parks, where people have a hanger and house on their property, one door or the other would be going onto the neighbor’s property.

quote:

Originally posted by jcsabolt2:
V-Tail,

Out of my own curiosity, why not opt for a sliding door? Would seem easier to maintain and not near as complex of an assembly.

Because (as V-Tail mentioned earlier) those aren’t allowed on his airport.

You’re right about the easier to maintain though, especially if the doors roll on a track mounted on concrete.

At the little airport where I learned to fly the original hangars (built in the 1920s and 1930s) all had sliding doors. The hangars were spaced far enough apart that the tracks “overlapped” between the hangars, leaving between 12 & 13 feet wasted between them. The doors alternate in vs out going down the row.

Just finished doing a repair on the one of those we own that involved demoing the doors, jacking up the front of the hangar, restoring the arch of the (ancient) wood truss, plating the bottom beam with steel, tightening the steel tensioning rods, building new doors, mounting new tracks, and hanging the new doors. Maybe I should have ripped out the concrete approach with the slots that the bottom of the doors hang in, replaced it with concrete with embedded tracks and built the doors to roll on that rather than hanging from the tracks mounted to the truss. Hopefully it will still last long enough to be kids’ problem, or better yet their kids.

Our newer hangar on a condo association bordering the airport with an access agreement has the hangars all side by side with bifold doors (hinged at the top, hinged in the middle, opened and closed by an electric motor on the door turning a spindle that either tightens or loosens cables running from the spindle near the bottom of the door up to the top.

The new hangars that the County built on site November at our home airport have sliding doors, but are tight together with shared walls. They alternate, one hangar’s doors are outside and open across the front of their neighbors, the next are inside and open inside their neighbors’ hangars. If you are renting one of the latter, you don’t want to leave anything in the first six or eight inches of your hangar.

I suspect it involves a trade off between ease/simplicity/cost of construction and cost of land. If the land is cheap, space them out, put in sliders, and everyone gets full use of their hangar. If the land is expensive, put in doors that only affect the area immediately in front of the hangar, and mostly only when in transit. Or if you’re the County and you can take a my way or the Highway approach with the hangars you’re going to rent out, stuff them in tight and have the doors impact the neighbors. Everything is a trade off.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: slosig,

I had doors like that on my hangar at Desert Aire (M94). The hinges all had zirk fittings and were lubed every year.

In my former life I built hangars and installed many, many hangar doors. I preferred the bi-fold type over the hydraulic ram, it just seemed like the ram was always trying to rip the door off the building.