A Big Steel Door

My friend Alec designed his own house on Kings Mountain in San Mateo County. When he asked me to build the house I was thrilled and jumped right at the opportunity. Alec is an amazingly creative and talented designer and musician so I knew it was going to be a fun project from start to finish.

This door project came up about halfway through the construction of the house. Of course the house was going to need a front door but not just any front door would do. Alec wanted a big wide door with 4 steel plate panels on each side. A steel frame on the interior would allow for fastening the plate steel and allow room for insulation. The perimeter of the door would be homogony with allowances for weatherstripping and multipoint locking features. To top it off, since the door was so big, and heavy it would need to be installed on a pivot hinge rather than traditional mortised hinges. Alec left it to me to figure out how to build it.

Step 1 was Sketchup to get the design process started. I did the following drawing which was soon followed up by a much more detailed one from Alec.

The jambs were 1/2” plate steel and needed to be prepped for a latch and stops along with a hole for the pivot hardware. After that went in we got to work welding up the framing and tacking on the steel plate. The exterior plate steel was welded to the frame from the inside of the door. The inside of the door was packed with rigid insulation and then the interior plate steel was attached using tapped screws. The little window in the door is the coolest little feature 2” wide x 5” tall. Just big enough to see who’s standing outside.

The other super cool feature about this entry is the plate steel canopy over the front door. This was fabricated by the same guys who did all the structural steel framing on the job and it just seems to defy gravity as it juts out from the face of the building.