The $507 million Golden 1 Center multipurpose indoor arena, also known as the Sacramento Kings Stadium, in downtown Sacramento, Calif., went through a lengthy design and construction process that culminated in five, massive one-of-a-kind bifold strap latch doors from Hector, Minn.-based Schweiss Doors used at the stadium entrance. Three of these doors measure 29 feet by 41 feet, 5 inches, and the other two were 29 feet, 4 inches by 41 feet, 5 inches. Each door is lifted by three, 5-hp motors. The liftstraps are 6 inches wide, compared to the usual 3-inch width. The doors, with glass, weigh in at about 28,000 lbs. each.
Sacramento Kings Stadium requirements lead to new Schweiss Doors top-drive autolatch system
The motors housed in the ceiling, required 480-volt, three-phase, 50-amp electrical to raise the doors, quickly, quietly and safely. Three of the doors face down at an 11-degree angle to make them partly self-shading and to prevent unwanted reflections.
The Schweiss doors are glazed with low-E, safety-laminated, fritted gray glass, so birds won’t bang into them by mistake. The colossal doors take a little over three minutes to open completely and can also be controlled by an iPhone app.
How It All Started
Design Principal Architect Rob Rothblatt from AECOM Architecture in Los Angeles, and a draftsman came out to the Schweiss door factory in Minnesota to get a better handle on how Schweiss designs and builds its doors.
They liked what they saw and returned to California to report what they learned from their field visit to their team of at least five AECOM architects and draftsmen who spent more time with the door project before making a final decision.
Challenges Faced—Solutions Achieved
For quite some time, Schweiss Doors was producing an automatic-locking latch strap system for bifold doors that operated with bottom-drive motors, but not for top-drive mounted motors. Through this successful project, Schweiss now offers an auto-latching system for all its top-drive bifold door orders.
Rothblatt says, “We challenged Schweiss to do things they had never done before to make this work, and they did. These doors are canted on a 15-degree angle and are not the same length, two of the doors are angled and three doors are straight, meaning they don’t travel the same distance and they don’t stack exactly the same way.”
“I looked at several door companies and in interviewing Schweiss they basically said, ‘OK, you want something atypical, it’s a challenge but we think we can do it.’ Everybody else dropped out. Schweiss won the project by being willing to take the risk and do something architecturally challenging. The other companies couldn’t do a bifold door like Schweiss, and wanted to charge us $60,000 upfront in engineering costs on a door they didn’t even think they could do,” says Rathblatt.
The first piece of the six-story, glass bifold door was tested over a couple of months time to make sure the door was properly functioning before glass was installed by Bagatelos Architectural Glass Systems of Sacramento.
“It was a very fun and uniquely formidable project,” says Mike Schweiss, owner of Schweiss Doors. “We have manufactured thousands of doors through the years and these doors were by far unique in so many ways. Our Schweiss design team spent many challenging hours figuring out a method of closing the doors and designing a top-mount automatic latching system for the doors for this first LEED Platinum arena in the whole world.”
Installing the Doors was also a Challenge
According to Bill Schmidt, CEO of Bill Schmidt Construction of Maxwell, Calif., installation of these five doors posed a real challenge. It was an install that they spent nearly three months on.
“It was pretty hard. We had to use a chain hoist and a forklift because of the weight limitations on the concrete. We had six people at one time drilling all the holes,” says Schmidt. “The side rails were hard to do because the doors weren’t vertical but leaning out 11 degrees. The engineers put thicker side rails on than normal.“
Schmidt also says that they had one of their most important safety guys looking over his work, resulting in a nightmare of paperwork. He had to have everything on paper—weights of every piece of equipment, steel, everything.
“Just knowing that we installed these doors is what I like most,” says Schmidt. “It was the first of its kind with the top-mounted autolocks and was hard because no one had ever done it before. The doors make the arena—that’s what everybody talks about. It was a project that was hard from everybody’s standpoint; engineers, architects, installers— it was really challenging.”
Pat Schmidt is an award-winning feature and technical writer for Hector, Minn.-based Schweiss Doors. His past editorial experiences include writing for Alaska Flying magazine, Alaska Outdoors magazine and managing newspapers in Minnesota and Alaska since 1973. To learn more, visit www.bifold.com.