Steel Garage Doors

• 0.5mm to 0.8mm galvanised sheet
• Chromadek or powder-coated to any RAL
• Roll-up, sectional or tip-up

Most garage doors in South Africa are steel, and for good reason. It is strong, it is cheap to make in volume, it takes a hard-wearing finish, and when something goes wrong it can be repaired rather than replaced. If you are not on the coast and not chasing a particular look, a well-built steel door is usually the right call.

What we build them from

• Galvanised sheet, 0.5mm to 0.8mm. The gauge is the specification that matters most. Thin sheet dents when a bicycle falls against it; 0.8mm does not. We quote the gauge on every proposal so you can compare like with like.
• Chromadek or powder coating. Chromadek is a factory-applied coil coating, tough and consistent. Powder coating lets us match any RAL colour to the trim on the house. Both go over galvanising, not over bare steel.
• Ribbed or flush profiles. Ribbing adds stiffness across the width, which is why most wide doors are ribbed. Flush looks cleaner and needs a heavier gauge or internal bracing to stay flat.

Which mechanism

Steel is the only material that works in every garage door mechanism we make, so the choice comes down to the building:

• Roll-up. Slats curl into a barrel above the opening. Needs no ceiling track, so it is the answer for garages with beams, storage racking or a flat roof.
• Sectional. Hinged panels stack under the ceiling. The best seal, the quietest run, and the easiest to insulate. Needs headroom.
• Tip-up. One panel counterbalanced on a frame. The cheapest to make and to repair, and still very common on older Gauteng homes.

Sizes

Standard single openings in South Africa run around 2 400mm to 2 700mm wide and standard doubles around 4 200mm to 4 800mm, but we build to the measured opening rather than to those figures. Older houses are rarely square, and a stock-size door forced into an out-of-square opening is what produces the daylight gap along one side that everybody notices later.

Rust: the honest version

Steel rusts if the coating is breached and left. The two places it starts are the bottom rail, where the door sits in driveway water, and around fixings and hinges. We use galvanised bottom rails, seal the cut edges, and fit a proper bottom weather seal so the steel is not standing in water. Inland, a maintained steel door will run for well over a decade. Within a few kilometres of the sea, we will steer you to aluminium instead and explain why.

Motorisation and security

Every steel door we fit takes a standard operator with soft start and stop, obstruction detection, rolling-code remotes and battery backup so load-shedding does not lock you in or out. On roll-up doors we fit anti-lift brackets; on sectional doors, a locking bar into both side tracks. A steel door with the standard hardware is genuinely difficult to force compared with the alternatives.

Repairs, on any make

This is most of what our teams do day to day: replacing dented or rusted bottom sections, re-tensioning or replacing springs, swapping worn rollers, brackets and cables, straightening tracks, and repairing curtains that have jumped their guides. Almost every steel door is repairable. If yours is beyond it, we will say so rather than fit parts to something that will fail again in a year.

For a quote, send the opening width and height, your headroom above the lintel, and a photo of the existing door if there is one. We come back with the gauge, the finish and the mechanism we would use, and what each costs.

Steel garage door repairs are our most common callout — panel damage, bent tracks and tired springs. If the door has been hit more than once, a roller door or a shutter door takes the knock better than a panel does.