What One Frameless Glass Door Actually Needs

Nobody sells a frameless glass door. What gets sold is a sheet of toughened glass with holes and notches cut into it before tempering, plus six or seven separate metal parts that clamp to it. The glass comes from a local processor. The metal comes from us. The part nobody remembers to order is almost always the same one, and it is not the handle.

Start at the bottom, because that is where the door's weight and its entire closing behaviour live. A frameless door pivots on a floor spring — a hydraulic body set into the finished floor in a cement box, carrying the leaf's weight and controlling how fast it swings back. It is the most expensive single item on the list, it is the one with the longest lead time, and it has to be ordered before the floor screed is poured, because retrofitting one means cutting up a finished floor. Our JU-series floor springs sit in the door-closers category rather than under glass, which is a catalogue convention rather than a hint about what they are for, and it is a common reason a glass-door quote comes back missing its most important line.

The floor spring does not touch the glass directly. A bottom patch fitting clamps to the lower corner of the leaf and engages the spring's spindle, transferring the load. At the top, a matching top patch fitting takes a pivot pin. Those two are the minimum, and they are handed as a pair for a single door — which means a pair of doors needs two sets, mirrored, and ordering four identical patches gets you two doors that both open the wrong way.

Above the door, if the opening is taller than the leaf, there is a fixed glass over-panel, and the joint between door and over-panel takes an over-panel patch — a connector that clamps both sheets and carries the top pivot. This is the part that gets discovered on site. A buyer measures the door, orders top and bottom patches, and finds on installation day that the top patch has nothing to fix to, because the head of the opening is glass rather than structure. If there is glass above the door, there is a third patch in the order.

Then the lock, and here the sequence matters more than the part. A glass door lock is a patch-style body clamped to the leaf, engaging either a floor socket or a strike in the adjacent panel. Both the lock body and its counterpart need cut-outs in the glass, and toughened glass cannot be cut, drilled or notched after tempering. Every hole, every notch, every corner cut-out has to be on the processor's drawing before the sheet goes in the furnace. Deciding to add a lock after the glass is made means buying the glass again. This is the single most expensive mistake on a frameless job and it is always a sequencing mistake, never a hardware one.

Last, the pull handle, which is the part everyone starts with. Ours run from 300mm to 600mm in the 100-series, in back-to-back and single-sided arrangements, and the number that matters is not the overall length but the fixing centre — the distance between the two holes, because the holes are in the glass and the glass is already made. Our published centre distances come off the production drawings rather than off marketing copy, and they differ between models that look identical: 148mm on the 100 and the 107, 147mm on the 102, 125mm on the 106. A millimetre is not a rounding error when the hole is already drilled.

So the checklist for one door, in the order things go wrong: floor spring, bottom patch, top patch, over-panel patch if there is glass above, lock body, floor socket or strike, pull handle. Then two numbers that govern all of them — the glass thickness, because patch fittings are made for a specific range and 10mm and 12mm are not interchangeable, and the fixing centre on the handle. Our patch range is built for 10 to 12mm toughened glass; confirm the thickness with the processor before the fittings are ordered, not after.

One thing we do not currently publish, and should: which of our patch fittings, locks and floor springs are designed to work together as a set. We make all three, the combinations are known in the factory, and a buyer cannot see them from the catalogue — the parts sit in three different categories and nothing joins them up. Until that is fixed on the site, send the export team the leaf size, the glass thickness, whether there is an over-panel and whether the door needs to lock, and ask for the parts list rather than for a price on a handle. It takes one email and it prevents the two failures above, both of which cost more than the hardware.