Door hardware kits introduce walk-in coolrooms and freezers to many curiously shaped components. There are spring-loaded mechanisms to close that final crucial gap and create a perfect seal. Additionally, there are plastic curtains to soften the interface between the outside environment and the chill inner chamber. Floor guide rollers are just another member of this vital mechanical sealing group. Here’s a walkthrough that illustrates the role of these ground-level guides.
What are Floor Guide Rollers?
Designed as seal-essential rolling door components, these guides, brackets, and wheels support heavy coolroom doors and move them along accurately established grooves. In other words, this is a mechanical entryway solution that enables sliding walk-in doors to function properly. Keep that notion firmly in mind as we consider the fixed railings that transport the rollers. Certainly, those smoothly rotating wheels are important fittings, but the wheeled constructs aren’t built to create that crucial seal we just highlighted. No, it’s the location of the guides, the wheel rails that decide seal integrity. But wait, the floor guide rollers don’t handle all of this back-breaking work, do they?
It’s A Family Affair
A glance into a roller guide inventory reveals a veritable smorgasbord of metal parts. There are h-type fixtures and base plates with nylon stoppers, plus many more floor guide components. Meanwhile, up top, hanging roller assemblies support the weight of heavily insulated doors, the slab-like panels that slide effortlessly on grooved rails. Made from die-cast alloys, the toughened rollers, brackets, and extended guides, are built to expedite entry while delivering a guide system that guarantees gap-free opening and closing.
Assessing Entryway Sealing Hardware
A modular cooler with beautifully assembled composite panels on every interior surface is a wonderful sight to behold, but it can also be quickly rendered ineffective if the door hardware isn’t configured correctly. Essentially, the floor guide system, the rails and mechanical routeing assemblies must be accurately aligned so that the floor guide rollers convey the supported door to its decreed location. There are door gaskets to consider, rail assemblies, and the heavy duty rollers. Supplementary additions to this layout include transparent plastic curtains, plate-constrained nylon stoppers, and offset guide plates.
The profile of each floor guide roller is typically designed to accommodate a central furrow. It’s this circular depression that runs smoothly along an extruded track, a rail that makes the doors glide steadily inward and outward. As it snaps into place and closes, a series of flexible gaskets give life to a perfect seal, one that’s every bit as sound as a hinged hardware solution and its hydraulic door clamping mechanism.
Mastic is a semi-solid paste, a sealant that’s commonly employed in many industrial and commercial settings. Importantly, this sealant can be formulated as a “non-skinning” product, but more on this property later. Meanwhile, a comparable silicone sealant exhibits similar properties. It’s flexible, highly temperature capable, and designed to quickly adhere surfaces.
Neutral Cure Silicone Sealants
The liquid rubber is pressed out of a tube by a caulking gun. Chemically neutral by design, the malleable compound lacks a plastic backbone. Instead, the inert silicon creates an elasticized barrier, an insulating glue that adheres while flexing. That’s an important quality for a sealed chamber that will contract invisibly as the arctic climate takes hold. Again, because of the silicon core, the stretchy seal adheres with non-toxic strength.
Mastic as a Refrigeration Sealant
This is a pasty material, like the sealants used to support bathroom tiles. An added non-skinning property then approximates the permanently stretchy feature found in silicone, which means Mastic also creates a flexing coolroom seal, one that’s as elastic as it is airtight. Seemingly, one more barrier between the two terms has fallen. In point of fact, many industry types use silicone and mastic as interchangeable terms. Granted, silicone was once considered a sealant while Mastic was regarded a builder’s friend, a sealant for the bathroom, but formula advances have washed away these differences until their two product lines share many common features.
The Versatile Mortar in a Refrigerated Chamber
At the end of the day, both of these products are sourced from different chemical domains, but they accommodate the same functions. The original Mastic came from a tree, but it’s now made synthetically. Silicone sealants came from rubber trees, but they’re also formulated synthetically now, yet folk continue to swap their brand names and chemical terms. Regardless of the name, picture older Mastic as the soft jointing agent used by builders. Conversely, silicone was the lubricating liquid that sealed small flanges and oiled moving parts. In this form, though, the paste and gel, they both exist eternally as a semi-cured sealant, a product that acts as a temperature, dust, and moisture barrier.
Used in wall joints, glass and plastic window seals, and as gap fillers, both silicone and Mastic are capable of creating a flexible barrier, one that won’t crack or fracture when the frosty and perhaps moist refrigerated enclosure contracts then expands in response to the temperature variances that are part-and-parcel of a coolroom or freezer’s operational existence.
C&M Coolrooms can create a custom solution for your specific needs. Talk to one of team members today.
