Damaged a Door Frame with Lift

[jmellc]

Watch for this. We have taken a scissor lift through doorways into schools, churches and office buildings countless times by removing the door closer and opening door wider. Always worked OK, no problems.

I did this in a building this week and crushed the bottom plate. Have to force door to close it. Customer was irate. I told him we'd done this countless times at other buildings and never had a problem. Obviously, this plate isn't as sturdy as some. He's having some other door work done and we will ask that crew to replace or repair the plate.

Watch out for this. It's the last thing I expected. Get someone's OK if not sure about it.

 

[Jraef]

Originally installed by the low bidder... no spec for it so they got the cheapest one on the market.

 

[Craigv]

To be fair, interior door thresholds are rarely spec'd to withstand a 3,000lb lift. A sheet of 3/8" plywood with the ends beveled will usually spread the weight enough to protect a threshold, but removing it where possible eliminates the problem entirely.

This reminds me of a re-lamping job in a 1,000,000 sq ft building that had a two-story open cafeteria area and enclosed stairwells. It required an articulated lift, and a rental was delivered to the wrong location at the building...the receiving loading dock. The rental driver was a really tough-looking woman who was only interested in getting the lift off her trailer, and she backed it over the adjustable bridge into the dock area and drove off. This thing was huge and barely fit in the room...it clearly couldn't make the turns in the hallway leading to the cafeteria, assuming it would even fit through the double doors from the loading dock.

The company engineer and safety department folks showed up and had a fit. The lift outweighed the loading dock bridge capacity by over 10,000 pounds, and far exceeded the weight capacity of the hallway floor, which ran over a basement area. A huge corporate kerfuffle ensued, with multiple meetings and finger-pointing over how that lift got into their loading dock...none of the dock workers would admit they were simply afraid to tell that female driver not to unload the lift...

We never did re-lamp those particular luminaries....

 

[kwired]

Quite often there is no threshold except maybe at exterior doors where they are there to help close gap for air tightness.

Probably a good idea to make a ramp of some sort to go over them when you do encounter them.