Door hardware isn’t something we take lightly. We enjoy meeting the needs of our customers with quality AND innovation.
However, there are times that innovations just aren’t good enough to meet the incredibly high standards we place on our products. When innovation is necessary and makes sense we are on board and come up with and utilize everything at our disposal to meet those needs with new solutions.
It’s this innovation that led us to create the UltraLatch, a product that allows those with limited mobility to open doors without any turning motion.
Why Not Adjustable?
This is a common question people ask if they aren’t in the door hardware industry. Having an “adjustable” hinge sounds so innovative and cutting edge in terms of design, but is it really? It really comes down to 2 basic questions you should ask yourself. Why? And How? Why would I need to adjust an invisible adjustable and how do you make an invisible hinge “adjustable”.
Why
The most common reason cited for why you need an adjustable hinge is because once a building settles the door may get out of alignment and need adjusting. What most people don’t know is that commercial buildings don’t settle. It is part of the building codes. If a building settles something is wrong and you may have larger problems to deal with.
How
If a building is not supposed to settle and well-built structures don’t settle what else can cause a door to get out of alignment and sag? The most common answer is the hinges themselves are actually wearing out and failing. As the metal wears against the metal from opening and closing a door it will wear.
With adjustable hinges that wear is applied on the weakest part of the door, which is generally the adjustment screws. Imagine the weight of a 200 pound door opening and closing all day long and the weight being focused on a couple of adjustment screws. It stands to reason that this very design element will wear quickly and cause a door to actually begin to sag. That sagging will require that you “adjust” your door to bring it back into alignment. So the very design feature of these hinges the “adjustability” is one of the reasons the door actually needs to be adjusting. Talk about job security! You create a feature that fixes a problem that didn’t exist before you created the “feature” you are trying to sell.
The SOSS Difference
What makes SOSS Invisible Hinges different is the design of our hinges has been around for over a 100 years. Some of our hinges are still in building opening and closing doors over 70 years later without a hint of needing to be adjusted.
The “secret” is our hinges stack up on solid metal plates and it is these stacks of metal that hold the weight of door – not tiny adjustment screws. We don’t create adjustable hinges because our hinges don’t require adjusting. Never did. Never will.
We have a full line of hinges to choose from, and a list of dealers if you would like to know more.