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Vinyl bottom track of screen door has buckled

Vinyl bottom track of screen door has buckled


  #1  
Old 07-28-13, 10:45 AM
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Vinyl bottom track of screen door has buckled

My sliding glass door has what appears to be a vinyl bottom track for the screen door, and it has buckled (perhaps due to unusually hot temperatures recently) so that the screen doors cannot be slid in their track.

Does anyone know what brand of door this is, or where I can obtain a replacement bottom track? I can find no identifying marks on the door, so I'm hoping that the track itself is distinctive enough to identify the manufacturer. The track can be pulled out without tools. If a replacement is hard to find, I was thinking of taking it out and trying to use a heat gun to soften it, and then clamping it around a piece of wood that would fit inside it (the track is U-shaped, in an attempt to remold it to its original shape.
 
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Old 07-28-13, 11:12 AM
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Sorry...I don't know the brand. Maybe a picture of the overall door will help.

I will offer this....that's not buckling from heat. Someone tried to break in by using a tool and trying to lift the door off it's track. I'd lay odds on that.

Your fix sounds like a good plan.
 
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Old 07-28-13, 12:57 PM
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100% agree with Gunguy. Someone was prying. The top of the area that is crimped has changed colour to a brighter white from the pressure of the tool prying. Slow process of buckling from heat would have made a more uniform shape change without the colour change.
 
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Old 07-28-13, 03:54 PM
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I don't think that's it, because it would be simpler just to cut the screen, and even that is not necessary, because even when the two screens are locked together, you can move them as a unit all the way to one side or the other, which leaves half of the door open (if the sliding glass door is unlocked). The attached photo will make this clear. The track is just for the screen doors; the sliding glass doors ride on an aluminum track. The picture I posted earlier is a close-up of the area circled in red.

What's especially strange is that there is plenty of expansion space at each end of the vinyl so that even if it expanded in hot temperatures, it would never get pushed upwards. Before this happened, I saw that the track was developing some lateral waviness in it that was making the screen doors hard to move.
 
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