A high lift sectional industrial door extends your sectional industrial door’s track so that the door hugs the wall and goes up higher before the horizontal curve. It makes better use of the vertical space in your garage and gives you at least 12” – 15” more headroom in your garage by moving the sectional industrial door track closer to the ceiling.
What is included in a high lift sectional industrial door kit?
A high lift sectional industrial door changes how your sectional industrial door travels along the track. If you think about it, you’re making the door travel up farther before it travels back.
That puts a different kind of stress on the components. That means a few parts need to change too.
(1)The garage track: Each installation is going to be different, depending on your garage. In my case, I’ve got 10 foot ceilings in my garage but my sectional industrial door track is right around 7 1/2 feet high. I’m hoping to get another 24” in headroom by installing the high-lift kit. That means that I’m going to need an additional two feet of track more than I have now.
(2)Torsion spring: Unless your builder seriously over-estimated the weight of your sectional industrial door, the torsion spring has to be swapped out for a heavier duty spring. The torsion spring is what does the heavy lifting (pun intended). It has to be balanced correctly so that your sectional industrial door opens smoothly.
(3)Drums: The drums are the part of the sectional industrial door that the cable winds around as the door opens and closes.
Without getting too technical (physics was one of my worst subjects), because the door is spending more of it’s travel time moving up-and-down instead of forward-and-back, the cable needs to wind around the drum differently in order to keep a consistent tension on the wire. This means they need to be replaced as well.
Why you need a high-lift sectional industrial door?
There are a couple of obvious use-cases for a high lift sectional industrial door.
If you want to put a car-lift in your garage, you’re going to need as much clearance as possible. Most garages have 10′ ceilings, which is usually enough to accommodate two cars stacked on top of each other. Obviously you can’t do this with an SUV or pickup truck, but you will be able to park a sports car and most sedans together like this.
I’m not planning on getting a lift, but I don’t want garage tracks blocking my valuable ceiling space. I want to get as much stuff off the floor as possible. The more ceiling space I have in my garage, the more overhead storage I can use.
Even if you don’t want a lift or more overhead storage, you just may want some additional headroom for a garage gym.
