Screen door part and screen door roller facts

Over the years, a lot of different companies have made screen doors. It often becomes difficult to find the right screen door part or screen door roller because the manufacturer has long since gone out of business or the type of screen door part they use now is different.

Thankfully, there is some degree of standardization among manufacturers and you may be lucky enough to find that your screen door part or screen door roller is something that is regularly stocked by Home Depot or any of the big box hardware stores.

If you dont find what you need there, seek out references to the best glass shop in your area. Most glass shops hold on to inventories of many an obsolete screen door part. Some glass shops even manufacture their own equivalents to old screen door roller designs. Just be sure to make a note of the dimensions of your hard to find screen door part, or perhaps take a photograph of your hard to find screen door roller and carry it around with you. You can bring your old screen door part too but photos and notes are convenient to leave with the shop if they say they can source it for you.

I have a few common screen door part and screen door roller sales on ebay and from time to time I will post my ebay listings here in the off-chance that this is what you are looking for.

Screen Door Lock

Heres a picture of a typical screen door lock. There are usually 2 types. This one is commonly used where there is a hasp built right into a slot or a mortise right in the screen door. The lock is attached to the hasp and has handles that bolt onto both sides of the door.

There are also surface mount screen door locks. These are a little simpler. They are generally screwed onto the inside vertical stile of your screen door. They often have a simple hook and actuator built into the handle that hooks into a keeper installed on the patio door frame.

Screen door roller

There are many different shapes and sizes of screen door rollers. Over the years, many have become impossible to find due to the demise of the companies that once made them. Fortunately, however, you can often substitute some other manufacturers rollers. Sometimes this process makes the door work better than it did when it was new !

Usually steel or other metal rollers with ball bearings work much better than nylon wheels. Steel wheels will make your screen door fly open with the lightest touch. Steel wheels can carry more weight although they do rust if left exposed to snow and ice in the winter. Nylon rollers become brittle with age and eventually shatter. Although they do stand up to snow and ice better than metal rollers.
The picture below is a pretty common screen door roller, available with both nylon and steel ball bearing wheels. The roller shown has 1-1/4" diameter nylon rollers. The metal wheel versions use 1-1/8" diameter rollers. They both work in the same doors. This particular one is removed and installed by inserting the blade of a flat blade screwdriver into the metal tangs that secure the roller to the pivot point inside the screen door. You can also purchase the matching corners for this roller and replace rollers that are no longer manufactured. So long as the corner fits snugly in the screen door rails this technique will work fine.

The roller on the left combines a corner and a roller. This is an example of a roller which requires the whole screen door to be taken to pieces just to replace a broken roller.

These rollers are normally used on rollformed aluminum doors. These types of screen doors wear out fast. If you need to replace more than just the bottom rollers on one of these doors, I would reccomended getting a whole new screen door.

Screen door corners

Most screen doors are made by taking 4 aluminum rails and cutting the ends of the rails at 45 degrees then joining them together.

The thing that usually joins them together is a screen door corner. This is often a die cast aluminum "L" shaped part which fits snugly inside mitered corners of the screen door rails. These corners are made to fit specific screen door rollers. Sometimes if you have to change the rollers and the original rollers are obsolete you end up having to use new rollers and corners to do a proper repair.

Screen door corners are usually held in place by friction between the screen door rails and the tension of the screen material holding the frame together. Sometimes the old rails of the screen door are so worn the the corner fits loosely and wont stay in place by itself. If that happens you really need a brand new screen door, not a repair job. If you do spend money on new corners and leave them fitting loosely, the frame will most likely break again in a matter of months or weeks.

Other types of screen door construction involve "staked corners" These doors have the same 45 degree mitered screen rails, and they also have corners. But the corners are usually steel. The corners have holes and at the factory, a machine forces metal tabs cut in the aluminum rails into recesses in the steel corner. This is strong at first, but the aluminum weakens with screen door use and eventually the door looses its rigidity and has to be thrown out. Its not possible to properly fix a staked door. The rollers in a staked door are often not connected to the corners, so at least you can replace those without having to disassemble the frame.

A third type of screen door uses no corners at all. The aluminum rails are notched and joined together with 4 long screws at each corner. Often the same screw holds the roller in place too. These doors sometimes use nylon glides instead of rollers. Of all screen doors, these are probably the most difficult to find spare parts for.

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