Can’t Find my Pivots
Call any aluminum door company and they will tell you that replacing the pivots on a door or pair of doors is very hard and takes a lot of skill and special tools. Not…… Then they hand you a bill for $300 dollars an hour and a half later. Then you get over the freshly screwed feeling and find out the pivots cost from $25 to $50 each and proclaim that you could have done it just as easily. The biggest obstacle in this process is finding the right pivots. There are a couple of ways to check:
1. Find the manufacturer of the door, sometimes this is on the front of the door or stamped on the inner hinge side edge.
2. Because most of the pivots you will find are replacements parts and are aftermarket. They are made to match exactly to what was installed on your doors. Sometimes you can just look close at the pictures or diagrams that we give you and match up the whole patterns.
3. When looking at the pictures you need to check the size and shape of the top and bottom pivot because there are about 8 different kinds and they are all very similar.
4. Don’t worry about the color until you find the right kind. Almost all pivots come in Aluminum and, Duronic (Brown) and some come in more colors than that but they are usually special order (IE. Brass, Satin Nickel, Black) and are very expensive.
5. This is the most important part…. Flanges. The holes must be correct but if the flanges don’t match up then the bracket will not fit. This is the overall shape of the bracket.
I recently installed a set of pivots where the flanges matched but the holes did not. The installer that originally installed the doors did not use all the screw holes in the top pivot and until I got it down it was very confusing. I could not find a top pivot that matched the ones I had, and I sell them all. When I removed the top pivot I discovered the installer only used 3 of the 4 holes. Wow was I mad; I had been trying to figure this out longer than it took me to fix it. But you live and learn.
Steven Seigler
Seigler Corp.
