Convenience the key for Hunter builder

THE luxury, five-star Palm Lake Resort at Forster deserved five-star doors. That’s just what NC Doors designed, manufactured and installed. “For their Forster project, we created a bespoke face design chosen by the Palm Lake Group, which was in keeping with the Florida Keys theme,” NC Doors’ general manager Barry Drewitt said. “Our ready-to-hang profiled doors were hung in preassembled frames and jambs. That meant we could deliver them to the property and screw them on quickly without the usual hours of carpentry involved in traditional door installation. “The mixture of hardware routs included DDA-compliant locks and handles designed to meet disability guidelines. Another feature were timber louvres in the service cupboards.” There are 27 over-50s luxury resorts and seven aged care facilities in the Palm Lake Group, which operates three states. The Forster project manager, Jeff Foster said: “Barry and I have worked together before and he and his team are always looking to find ways to save us time and m

WHEN a flood devastated the northern NSW city of Lismore in 2022, the record 14.4m-high floodwater not only inundated hundreds of homes, but also critical community infrastructure. TAFE NSW appointed construction firm Lipman Pty Ltd to rebuild its campus in the heart of the city. The firm’s brief was to restore the heritage features of the main building where possible, or replace them in keeping in their original heritage style. Some 40 doors – around 90% – had to be replaced. NC Doors has partnered with Lipman on numerous new builds. At Lismore TAFE, the challenge was to not only faithfully replicate non-standard sized heritage doors, but to install them in frames and walls effected by days of immersion in floodwater.

Designing and manufacturing metal-clad timber doors for the ANSTO nuclear medical science complex in Sydney called for the skills of the entire NC Doors’ team. Our CAD designer Harris Butler visited the site of what is the world’s newest nuclear medicine facility to profile the door frames, capturing their exact dimensions. Collaborating with our CNC technician Jackson Sauer, the pair then developed the production programs required to size, shape and rout each of the door panels, which our fabricating team built by hand. NC Doors computer-assisted manufacturing process removes the hinge rebate panels and lockset cut-outs, so the hardware can be fitted in our factory. This allows the doors to arrive ready to be installed in hours, instead of days when this pre-installation work has to be done onsite by a carpenter. Our technology handled complex door designs Several of the doors incorporated fire-rated Pyropanel cores, others had acoustic-rated centres, while the security doors featured high-strength block cores, in 40-50mm thicknesses. A pair of galvanised steel-sheeted solid core doors (pictured left with Sean) featured vision panels with aluminium surrounds. “Where other door companies might struggle, NC Doors’ computer-assisted design and manufacturing technology can easily handle complex doors like these,” NC Doors’ General Manager and Director, Barry Drewitt said. “We were working with non-standard sizes and a variety of materials, while the hardware was anything but commonplace. In the process of writing new programs for our CNC routing machine, we incorporated some very unusual door componentry into the designs.” Precisely fitting doors and seals were critical Our two most experienced installers, company Director Ian Drewitt and Sean Cummins finished the doors in our factory, adding the Colourbond metal cladding to the faces and edges of those pictured below, along with much of the hardware. One of the challenges in designing the facility was accommodating various atmospheric pressures throughout the complex, which made it critical that the doors and seals fitted precisely. Pharmaceutical facilities are kept under positive pressure to keep dust contaminants out, while the nuclear industry facilities have negative atmospheric pressure to ensure that nothing escapes. NC Doors again partnered with door installation specialists Robson Doors, who called on our technology for the project, which is being built at Lucas Heights by Icon Co, the Australian construction company which formed a combined construction services business with Cockram Construction in 2018. “While these doors certainly were a challenge, custom-made non-standard doors are what we specialise in,” Barry Drewitt said.

NC Doors’ ability to supply custom-made timber doors precisely sized to their frames and with all the hardware cut-outs removed during manufacture offers clients huge savings on installation. But pre-fitting the hinges, locks and other hardware in our factory proved critical for Morgan Civil when the firm won a contract to upgrade a high-security data centre in Sydney. The project was relatively straight-forward: enclose existing high-voltage electrical switchboards supplying banks of internet servers at a high-security Sydney data centre to seal them from smoke, fire, dust and other debris. The challenge was that none of the construction work could be carried out on the premises. “Nothing that could generate a spark or dust was permitted anywhere near the equipment," company director, Tycho Leathbridge said. “Because we had to pre-assemble everything off-site, it was a huge bonus to have the hinges, mortice locks and smoke seals pre-fitted into the fire doors that arrived ready to go straight into the steel frames."