I have to admit, I visit the local frozen yogurt joint so often that the owners ask me if I want “the usual.”  Hey – it’s YOGURT…practically health food!  I wasn’t sure how I’d be able to make it through their winter break – about 2 months.  I survived, but the closer on their entrance door didn’t.  It lost all of its fluid and started looking for fingers to lop off.

In the simplest terms, a closer has a spring and fluid inside.  When you open the door, you’re compressing the spring, which then pushes the door closed.  The fluid flows through a series of valves, and that’s what allows you to regulate the closing speed.  You turn the valves to slow the flow of fluid for the main speed (the main sweep period of the closing cycle) and/or the latch speed (the last few inches of the closing cycle).  The accessibility codes and standards require a minimum closing speed of 5-6 seconds.  Without any fluid, the spring slams the door shut without any control.

I happened to have a Falcon SC60 in my office so I offered to replace the existing closer.  As much as I love LCN 4000 series closers, this was a job for the SC60, which is a direct retrofit of the existing closer.  In the old days I used to replace my share of closers but it’s been a while, so I recruited my brother to help.  You may recall that he replaced a closer on his office entrance a while back, so we made quite a team – a guy who had installed one closer in his lifetime, and a woman who hadn’t replaced a closer in years.

Before any of you point out the imperfections…I know this closer is aluminum and the door is dark bronze.  And I have no idea if the original closer was templated correctly but we were stuck with it since the drop plate was buried under the trim.  I wasn’t about to mess with it – you can call me a hacker, or you can just call me the Door Closer Fairy.  As I told the owner of the yogurt place, “Don’t tell anyone who replaced it for you or I’ll be getting requests from the pizza place, the bagel man…just tell them the Door Closer Fairy was here.”  Anyway, you get what you pay for, and this installation job is definitely worth two frozen yogurts. 

I was pleasantly surprised at how easy the SC60 was to install, and it works great.  It has a 10-year warranty and I’ll be able to check on it several times per week.  🙂

And for your viewing pleasure…a short film (you will notice that I STILL have laryngitis!!):

You need to login or register to bookmark/favorite this content.