Mag Locks, Door Closers + Pairs of Doors, Why Does it Have to Be So Hard?

As a ‘Hardware Guy’, a pet peeve of mine is the repetitive occurrence of Mag Locks appearing on doors & leaving no room for other necessary hardware items like door closers and/or door co ordination on pairs of doors.

A typical scenario would be a pair of aluminium exterior doors and lets add an astragal seal to the outside of the active leaf for weather proofing. These happen to be a set of entry doors so lets make them 810mm wide leaves in a typical commercial frame section. Security is to be provided by a dual armature mag lock, securing both leaves at the head, mounted centrally between the leaves.

Now here is where things often come unstuck. Exterior doors generally require a greater holding force, so the locks are that much larger( read longer).

Good quality (greater holding force) dual armature mag locks start at around 520mm & go on up to 712mm

TS8300 (480mm)

TS93 (570mm)

Divide that between each leaf and straight away you loose 260mm to 356mm of available door width on which to mount a door closer. So on our 810mm leaves we have at best 550mm and at worst 445mm left on which to fix our door closer. So, if you take say a DORMA TS8300 in Parallel Arm (480mm) your either going to just squeak in, or be 20mm short. If you’re using slide rail closers such as the DORMA TS93 (570mm) then your really in trouble.

OK so given the DORMA TS8300 and TS93 are generally speaking similar lengths as most other reputable door closers here’s a quick guide to what standard door leaf widths work with most common dual armature mag locks:

Briton M600AD          532mm                             810/810                                 910/910
Padde Z8                       532mm                            810/810                                  910/910
KABA KML10              532mm                            810/810                                   910/910
Schlage 392                  520mm                            810/810                                  910/910
Schlage 352                  635mm                            860/860                                 910/910
Loctronic 1720            712mm                             910/910                                   960/960

(Remember although this is just for pairs of doors, exactly the same issue occurs for single leaves also!)

But wait, there’s more! Remember that pesky astragal seal ( or rebated meeting stiles). That puppy means we have to co ordinate the closing sequence of the door leaves to ensure the doors actually close. Right, so that piece of hardware goes where? Oh that’s right, that prime piece of real estate the mag lock is sitting in!

The short answer here is there simply is nowhere for any surface mounted co ordination device to go with out removing the mag lock and that’s equally not an option.

One solution that has worked very well is to use DORMA ITS96 GSR Concealed Closer with integral Co Ordination System.  With this system the closer bodies are hidden in the door leaves & the track & Co Ordinator is concealed in the head frame. This leaves all the room in the world for mag locks and other such devices. The only ‘down side’ is maximum opening of each leaf is limited to 120 Deg. But with a minimum opening width of 1400mm this option does allow you a smaller leaf width than would normally be required, and it incorporates the Co Ordination system.

Often it’s a matter of working through everyone’s priorities to discover a path to whats really needed, and then working back to find what is achievable. Obviously this is so much easier to do before all the various components are thrown at the door, rather than after the fact!

If you really want a challenge, try and add in some panic hardware, of course we have an answer for that as well, but that’s another blog.

Thanks for your time, and as always we’re only too happy to help out.

Ka kite