Opportunity knocks for door company

Biggleswade-based Jewers Doors has installed the doors – in height equivalent to 10 double-decker buses stacked on top of each other – at the Nakilat ship repair yard in the city of Ras Laffan.

The firm, which has offices in the Stratton Business Park, is a world leader in the design, manufacture and installation of exceptionally large doors.

The company is used to making doors for aircraft hangers and other buildings with unusual requirements but the doors at the shipyard are the tallest it has installed in its 29-year history.

Jewers Doors has installed two of its Esavian doors measuring 45.1m high and 69.9m wide.

Each door weighs 68 tonnes and three giant cranes were used in the lifting process.

These are by far the tallest doors Jewers Doors has built and may well be some of the largest sliding doors in the world.

But in terms of surface area they are actually smaller than the 582m by 25.85m doors supplied for the Royal Airwing hangar at Dubai International Airport.

Jonathan Jewers from the firm said: “There is definitely a trend towards larger and larger buildings, especially in the aircraft and shipping maintenance and repair sectors.

“Just a few years ago we were supplying doors 21 metres high and 100 metres wide for aircraft hangars and now dimensions of 28 metres and 240 metres (and sometimes multiples of these) are quite common.

“Together with the increase in size, our Esavian doors now have sophisticated safety and control mechanisms and class-leading ‘green’ features.”

Videos of the lifting sequence can be viewed by logging onto www.youtube.com/user/esavian1