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Hinged locking bifold door question

JaWin | Posted in Construction Techniques on February 1, 2019 10:33am

Hello,

I’m trying to recreate a closet door setup that I had in a previous house but I’ve been unable to find any information or hardware to make it happen.  It feels like I must just be searching for the wrong thing and I’m hoping someone here has seen this type of setup before and might be able to point me in the right direction.

Our closet doors were bifolds but instead of running on a track, they used normal mortised door hinges between the doors and to attach to the jamb.  That’s easy to recreate.  The cool part was that there were springs at the top of the doors which basically caused them to “lock” into position either closed flat or folded up.  We could swing the door open as if it was a single solid door but, if we were going to leave it open, we could fold it up to be out of the way.  I’m attaching some pictures I took of how it was setup.  

Has anyone seen this setup and, if so, do you have any idea where I could find the hardware to recreate it?

Thanks so much for any help!

Jason

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Replies

  1. calvin | Feb 01, 2019 11:19am | #1

    Greetings. Here’s a link to Johnson Hardware for a full access bifold set up. No spring like your old one but perhaps this might work for you.

    http://johnsonhardware.com/1601-full-access-bi-fold-door-hardware

  2. User avater
    sawdust_steve | Feb 01, 2019 02:48pm | #2

    That setup looks like a simple butt hinge and spring. Why cant you just purchas ethe individual components and install?

    1. User avater
      JaWin | Feb 01, 2019 09:20pm | #3

      The hinges are simple enough but for the spring and attachments I figured someone must sell a kit with attachment points, a spring of the right length/tension/etc. I can try to roll my own but I'm not quite sure about size of spring, how to attach it such that it won't work its way off, etc.

      Maybe the original builder of that house did just make it up but I've been surprised by my inability to find any references online to this approach. I've found many references to people adding butt hinges and getting rid of the bifold mechanisms and many complaints about bifolds that won't stay flat and this solved the problem for us. If worse comes to worse, I'll take a stab at grabbing some strings and figuring out how to keep them in place but I was hoping that someone, somewhere, sold hardware purpose-built for the job.

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