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One specification, on every door we build — thermal-break aluminum, 6mm glass, an upgraded bottom-hung track, upgraded rollers and seals, crated to your dimensions and delivered on an insured private carrier. Then warranted up to fifteen years. The engineering comes first on this page, because that is what the coverage is written against.
Every item below ships on every Gladiator door and window. There is no premium package to buy up into. The parts that fail first on a cheap door are the parts we upgraded before you ever called us.
No vinyl. No wood core. No aluminum-reinforced composite. A continuous polyamide strut separates the inside and outside of every extrusion, so the frame doesn't conduct heat straight through or sweat in winter.
Most imported doors arrive with 4mm or 5mm lites. Ours are 6mm in a sealed insulated unit — stiffer, quieter, and far less prone to flex and edge-seal stress on wide panels.
An upgraded running surface set nearly flush to the floor. Panel weight goes down through the sill into the slab instead of hanging off the header, where the building can't help you.
Heavier-duty rollers and folding carriers than the stock hardware these systems normally ship with. This is the single most common failure point on wide-opening doors, so it is where we spend first.
Compression seals at every meeting stile and a continuous perimeter gasket, adjustable in the field as the building settles. Warranted ten years — most schedules leave seals off entirely.
Powder coat applied and cured at the factory before assembly, custom colors available across the range. Not a laminate film wrapped over white extrusion to fake a dark color.
Some brands publish a knock-down frame assembly video, because their frame gets built on your job site by whoever showed up. Ours arrives assembled and squared from the factory.
Each order is crated to its own dimensions and moved by a private insured carrier — not dropped into a common LTL network. Crating runs about $1,000 a shipment and we absorb it.
You buy from the company that owns the specification and answers the claim. There is no dealer in the middle to route a problem through, or to close before year ten.
The premise
Everything a wide-opening door does wrong in year ten was decided in year zero — in the extrusion, the glass thickness, and where the weight goes.
Sec. 02 — Five decisions, drawn
These are the five places a large door either holds up or doesn't. They are drawn below, because they are easier to see in section than to argue about in a brochure.
There are really only four ways to build a large door frame, and three of them are compromises you inherit for the life of the house.
Vinyl is cheap to extrude and can't span. It moves roughly twice as much as aluminum across a temperature swing, and it loses stiffness as it heats. That's why vinyl folding doors are sold with metal reinforcement buried inside the profile — the vinyl isn't structural, it's a jacket. It's also why extruded vinyl is typically offered in white and almond only: dark pigment absorbs heat, and a dark vinyl profile in full sun softens and distorts. Brands get around it by wrapping a laminate film over white extrusion, which is a film with its own adhesion life, not a finish.
Clad wood puts a wood core inside a metal skin. It looks right on day one. But the sill is where water ends up, and any breach in the cladding or the sealant joint lets water reach a core that swells, holds it, and eventually rots — usually invisibly, until the panel stops closing.
Untreated aluminum solves the movement problem and creates a thermal one: bare aluminum conducts heat about a thousand times better than vinyl, so the frame becomes a straight bridge between outside and inside, and it condenses.
Thermal-break aluminum is the fourth option and the only one without a trade you have to live with. Two independent aluminum shells, mechanically locked to a continuous polyamide strut that carries load but not heat. The frame stays dimensionally stable, takes any color, and doesn't rot, soften, or need anything hidden inside it to hold its shape.
Glass thickness is the quietest cost cut in this category, because nobody reads it and everybody feels it. A 4mm or 5mm lite is cheaper, lighter to ship, and easier on undersized hardware — and on a ten-foot panel it flexes noticeably with wind and temperature.
That flex doesn't break the glass. It works the edge of the insulated unit. Every cycle puts strain into the spacer and the primary seal, and a seal that's been flexed for a decade is the seal that eventually lets moisture in and fogs the unit from the inside. Going to 6mm cuts deflection sharply and takes that daily load off the exact component our fifteen-year glass coverage is written against.
Mass also buys you quiet. Sound transmission through glass is governed largely by weight, so a heavier lite is a measurably quieter room — which is the difference people actually notice when a twenty-foot wall of glass faces a street.
This is the decision that determines whether your door still works in fifteen years, and almost nobody asks about it at the point of sale.
A folding or sliding wall is heavy. Six panels of 6mm insulated glass in aluminum frames is several hundred pounds of moving weight, and that weight has to be carried somewhere. There are two answers.
Top-hung hangs every panel from a track fixed to the header. The whole assembly is now a load suspended from the beam above your opening, permanently. That works — as long as the header never moves. But headers do move. Wood shrinks and creeps under sustained load, framing settles in the first years of a house's life, and long-span beams deflect by design. Codes allow measurable deflection in a header; that allowance is fine for drywall and catastrophic for a door hung off it. A header that drops even a fraction of an inch across a twenty-foot opening shows up immediately as panels that drag, seals that stop compressing evenly, and a lock that won't throw. The fix is rarely the door. It's the building — and by then it's your problem, not the manufacturer's.
Bottom-hung — what we build — runs the panels on rollers in a sill track. The weight goes down through the track into the slab or the structural sill, which is the one part of the assembly that isn't going anywhere. The header carries guidance only, not load. When the building moves, the door isn't hanging from the part that moved.
Two other things follow from it. The track sits nearly flush, so the threshold is low, easy to walk over, easy to sweep, and doesn't read as a trip hazard across a main opening. And because the carriers are adjustable and the panels are supported from below, a door that goes out of adjustment is a service call with a hex key rather than a structural conversation about your header.
A door frame does nothing for thirty years. The rollers, carriers, hinges and seals do all the work — thousands of cycles under several hundred pounds — and they are almost always the first thing to go. Which is precisely why they are the first place the price gets cut on an imported system.
We specify heavier rollers and folding carriers than these systems ship with as standard, and multi-point compression seals at every meeting stile with a continuous perimeter gasket. The seals are designed to be re-adjusted in place as the building settles, so an even compression on day one can still be an even compression in year eight — which is why we're willing to put a ten-year term on them when most schedules simply omit weather seals from coverage entirely.
The one thing we need from you is trivial and non-negotiable: rinse the track and hardware with fresh water and a mild detergent every three months, more often near the coast. Salt and grit in a roller race is abrasive, and it is the leading cause of denied hardware claims across the entire industry. Keep a note of when you did it. That record is what turns a hardware claim into a shipment instead of a debate.
Two doors can carry the same spec sheet and be built completely differently. Cheap manufacturing doesn't show up in the literature — it shows up at the corners, in the wall thickness, and in what happened to the metal before it was painted.
A mitred corner can be crimped, which is fast and relies on deforming the metal to grip. Or it can be mechanically joined with a cleat and screw ports designed into the extrusion, then sealed — slower, more expensive, and it doesn't loosen as the frame is racked in shipping and installation. A corner that loosens is a corner that leaks, and no amount of caulk fixes it later.
Wall thickness is the other one. Thinner extrusion means less metal per foot, which is directly cheaper, and it means less material for screws to bite into at every hinge and lock point. Hardware pulling loose from thin extrusion is a failure that warranty language usually catalogues as "misuse."
And before any finish goes on, the aluminum has to be cleaned and pretreated. Skipping or shortcutting pretreatment is invisible for about three years, and is the reason a powder coat starts lifting at an edge in year five.
We're not asking you to take our word for any of this. Ask us these four questions, ask whoever else you're quoting, and compare the answers.
A door that arrives cracked is a claim nobody wanted and a schedule nobody planned for. So we spend real money on the part of the process the customer never sees.
Crates are built to the dimensions of your panels — not packed into whatever standard box is on the floor. Frames are bundled separately and marked to your order, so your installer can stage the job in the right sequence instead of unpacking everything to find one sill.
Delivery moves on a private insured carrier at our cost, not through a common LTL network where a crate gets cross-docked three times and handled by people with no reason to be careful. Fewer touches is the entire strategy.
Photograph the crate before it comes off the truck and note any visible damage on the delivery receipt. It takes five minutes, and it is the single most important thing you can do to protect a freight claim. Do not install a product you have already found a problem with.
The coverage
Everything above is why the schedule below reads the way it does. Read it before you buy, not after something goes wrong.
Sec. 04 — Limited product warranty
Coverage begins on the date of shipment and applies to defects in materials and workmanship that render the product unserviceable or unfit for ordinary recommended use.
None of this is unusual and none of it is difficult. Do these four and a claim is a phone call rather than an argument.
Open the crate and inspect the order as soon as it arrives. Report any visible defect or freight damage in writing, with photographs, before installation and before any finishing work. Do not install a product you have already found a problem with — installing it accepts it.
Installation must be performed by a licensed or otherwise qualified installer, in a good workmanlike manner, following our published installation instructions and applicable building codes. That means adequate header support, correct flashing and drainage, a level and properly prepared sill, and no field modification of the frame, sill or hardware.
Wash tracks, rollers and hardware with fresh water and a mild detergent at least quarterly, and more often within three miles of saltwater. Keep a simple record. Hardware claims require proof of maintenance, and salt and grit buildup is the leading cause of denied hardware claims across the industry.
Give us notice and a reasonable opportunity to inspect and perform before anyone else touches the product. Repairs or replacement parts sourced elsewhere without our written authorization are not reimbursable and may void coverage on the affected component.
Written in plain language rather than buried in a PDF nobody opens. Every section below is part of the warranty.
This warranty runs to the original owner of the residence into which the product is first installed, for as long as that owner owns and occupies it, up to the terms listed in Sec. 04. All terms begin on the date of shipment.
If the home is sold, coverage transfers once, to one subsequent owner, and continues to run from the original ship date — it does not restart. It cannot otherwise be assigned or transferred. Commercial and rental applications are quoted and warranted separately; contact us for those terms.
We warrant the product we build. We cannot warrant it against the opening it goes into.
Published performance values from laboratory testing — including AAMA and NFRC figures — describe tested samples under test conditions. Components and manufacturing carry an inherent range of tolerance, and installation, building movement and maintenance all affect real-world performance. A variance in field performance from a published laboratory value is not a defect and is not covered by this warranty.
For a covered issue we will supply the materials needed to repair the product at no charge. Where repair is not practical, we may satisfy our obligation by shipping a replacement part or product to the original delivery address, or by refunding the original purchase price of the affected product. Discontinued items are replaced with the current product of nearest quality and appearance.
Not included:
We require reasonable access to the product. Where access is not safe or practical, we may satisfy our obligation by supplying a replacement part without labor.
Where the product is installed at a destination outside the United States, the maximum warranty period is 2 years for glass and components and 10 years for folding system hardware. This limitation is based on the installation destination and does not apply to products installed within the United States, regardless of where they were manufactured.
This warranty sets out our maximum liability for the product and is your sole and exclusive remedy for any loss or damage arising from it. We disclaim all other warranties, express or implied, including merchantability and fitness for a particular purpose, and any warranty arising by operation of law, trade usage or course of dealing.
We are not liable for special, indirect, consequential or incidental damages. In no event shall our liability exceed the original purchase price of the product.
Some states do not allow the exclusion or limitation of implied warranties or of incidental or consequential damages, so the above may not apply to you. Where an implied warranty cannot be excluded by law, it is limited to the duration of this warranty. This warranty gives you specific legal rights, and you may have other rights that vary by state. Only an officer of Gladiator Window & Doors may modify or expand this warranty, and only in writing.
Claims come straight to us. There is no dealer network to route them through and no regional rep to track down.
Order number, purchase date and delivery location. Proof of ownership of the property. Photographs of the issue. For hardware claims, your maintenance records.
Email or call our team with the file above and a short description of the problem. We confirm receipt and tell you exactly what we need next — no ticket queue, no portal.
We review, and where the issue is covered we supply the parts or product needed to make it right. Give us the opportunity to inspect before any other work is done on the product.
If you want coverage confirmed for your specific configuration, exposure or jurisdiction before you place an order, call and ask. We would rather answer it now than argue about it in year seven.
Gladiator Window & Doors — Jacksonville Beach, Florida
This page summarizes the limited product warranty in effect at the date of shipment. Rev. 2026-08.
