Pivot doors, for entrances hinges can't carry.
Past a certain size a hinged door stops working, the weight tears at the frame and the door drops. A pivot carries the load on a spindle top and bottom instead, so a door twice the size of a standard leaf still swings with a fingertip. We fabricate them in Brooklyn on thermally broken aluminum.
The load goes down, not sideways.
Hinges hold a door up by pulling against the frame at the side. The bigger and heavier the door, the more leverage works against that connection; which is why oversized hinged doors sag, catch on the threshold, and eventually need the frame repaired.
A pivot puts the weight on a spindle at the top and bottom, close to the door's own axis. The frame carries almost none of it. That's what makes a door 4 or 5 feet wide feel light in the hand, and what keeps it feeling that way in a decade.
Size without sag
The pivot carries the load close to the axis, so an oversized leaf doesn’t work against its own frame.
Effortless in the hand
A correctly balanced pivot door of almost any size opens with one hand and stays where you leave it.
Architectural by nature
A door this size changes the proportions of an entrance; it’s the element people remember about the building.
Centre-hung, offset, and paired.
An offset pivot behaves more like a conventional door and gives a wider clear opening; a centre pivot is the more dramatic movement. Which one suits depends on the entrance and on how much clear width you actually need.
MB-86N Pivot.
Aluprof's pivot door system on the MB-86N platform, thermally broken, engineered for oversized leaves, and fabricated here to your opening.
A pivot door is the one element of a building people touch before they've decided anything else about it. It's worth getting the weight of it right.
Who installs it?
Your contractor. Pivot doors need a properly prepared floor and structural head; we supply the door with the setting-out detail your installer needs, and the floor spindle location has to be planned before the slab is finished.
Pivot door questions.
Yes. The bottom spindle sets into the floor, so its position needs to be known before the slab or the finished floor goes down. Talk to us early rather than after.
Multi-point locking is available on pivot leaves the same as on hinged entry doors.
Yes, and it’s a common request, though the glass adds significant weight, which is exactly the case a pivot handles better than hinges.
