Swing Door Supplier Wholesale: The Schedule Is the Order, Handing Has No Single Convention, and the Number That Moves the Price Is Doors Per Type, Not Doors

Buy one swing door and a mistake is an installation problem. Buy two hundred and the very same mistake is a logistics problem. The leaf is still the same leaf, the hinge is still the same hinge, but the cost of being wrong has changed species: it is no longer measured in a carpenter's afternoon, it is measured in a container, a reinstallation programme and a set of handed locksets that nobody will take back.

Here is the sentence that the rest of this page explains. A wholesale order of windows is the same window many times. A wholesale order of swing doors is many different doors that happen to share a catalogue page. A window repeats. A swing door does not, because every opening asks the same leaf six separate questions and can answer each of them differently. Wholesale pricing is built on repetition, and the swing door is the product in the building that resists repetition hardest.

We should say early what we are and are not. ALPES builds aluminium system windows and doors: outward-opening casement windows, a side-press sliding window, tilt-and-turn, and thermal-break sliding doors. Our swing door category page exists but has no product on it. We are writing this anyway, and not as a bait piece, because the six questions in this article are the same six questions our own products have to answer. If you want a supplier who pretends to have every door type on the shelf, you will not have trouble finding one.

One word, five products, and only one of them is what you meant

Before wholesale even enters the conversation, the phrase itself has to be split. Search any market for a swing door and you will be offered, in no particular order, an architectural hinged door, a commercial kitchen traffic door, a shower screen, a closet leaf, a garage leaf and an automatic operator assembly. They are drawn by different people, bought by different people, and tested against different things. Some of them are not doors in the building-envelope sense at all.

The public sources are unusually blunt about this. One specialist door guide states plainly that a double-action swing door is a traffic door, not a fire, smoke, acoustic, thermal or hygienic airlock door, and that it does not seal. Another, writing for specifiers, notes that double-action doors open in both directions and self-centre, and that vision panels at eye level are standard practice and in many jurisdictions a code requirement in commercial kitchens and service areas. Neither of those sentences can be said about the front door of a house, and both of them are true about a commercial kitchen swing door.

There is a useful trap hidden in the middle row. Traffic doors are widely assumed to be exempt from door code, and the published position is the opposite: the model codes do not specifically address them, but they do not specifically exempt them either, so a traffic door sitting on an accessible route or on a required means of egress is subject to the same door requirements as anything else. The published examples are specific: at least thirty-two inches of clear opening width, measured from the face of the door at the ninety-degree open position to the stop on the strike jamb; for a pair, at least one leaf must provide that width; and on an impact door the measurement is taken to the tear-ｄｒｏｐ bumper rather than the door face, because the bumper projects into the bottom thirty-four inches where projections are not allowed. A flush bottom surface is required on the push side up to ten inches from the floor. None of that appears on a catalogue page. All of it appears on a schedule.

The schedule is the order

One interior door manufacturer puts the whole problem in a single sentence: an incomplete schedule is the most common reason door quotations come back full of assumptions, and assumptions become site problems. That sentence is the reason a wholesale enquiry should never start with a quantity.

A door schedule is one row per opening, keyed to the tag on the floor plan. It is read by the contractor who prices it, by the door, frame and hardware suppliers who prepare submittals against it, and by whoever checks the life-safety plan. Publicly published templates converge on the same set of columns, and two things about that convergence matter. First, the schedule points out to other documents: door type elevations, head, jamb and sill details, and a numbered hardware set. Second, the hardware set column is meaningless unless a second sheet lists what each set contains, one item per row, so that the number always has something behind it.

Notice the last row. It is the row that wholesale buyers leave blank and it is the row that sets the price. Notice also the size row: a nominal call-out such as a 32x80 entry door is a name, not a dimension. On a properly built schedule the same opening produces three numbers: the structural opening in the wall, the leaf size, and the clear opening that the code actually measures. None of the three equals the call-out, and the one that goes on the purchase order is the leaf size in millimetres.

A door schedule you can paste into an enquiry

This is the deliverable. Copy it, one row per opening, and send it instead of a total count. Anything you leave blank becomes an assumption, and assumptions are the thing the manufacturer will quietly resolve in his own favour.

Handing: four letters, at least two conventions, one container

Handing is the variable that turns a wholesale order into a gamble, and it is worth saying why in one breath: every hardware component on the door is manufactured to match a specific hand. Hinges, locksets, closers and exit devices. Order the wrong hand and the hardware does not install correctly, and in some cases does not function at all.

The four designations are LH, RH, LHR and RHR. Beyond that, the published guidance diverges, and the divergence is the point rather than a footnote.

Read the middle two rows against each other. One says reverse means the leaf comes toward you; the other says reverse means it goes away from you. Both are published by people who sell door hardware for a living. The reason they disagree is that they start from different sides of the opening, and both are internally consistent. On top of that, published hardware guidance states outright that the North American system and the European DIN system are different, that the European left and right are always viewed from the pull side, and that for export projects you should specify the reference viewpoint, the standard used, and then send diagrams, a schedule and photographs.

That is why the schedule column is not "handing". It is handing plus the convention. One published schedule guide gets this exactly right and puts both in the same cell: left or right, and the convention used.

Four consequences follow, and they are the reason this section exists in an article about wholesale rather than in an article about hinges.

• Handed hardware is not returnable. One hardware distributor states this without softening it: suppliers cannot accept returns on handed products because they cannot resell hardware configured for a specific application. At a quantity of one this is annoying. At a quantity of two hundred it is a line item you absorb.
• A pair is not two of the same door. Published guidance is explicit: a double door pair typically includes one LH and one RH leaf when both swing away from the approach side, not two doors with identical handing. Assuming symmetry is named as one of the most common determination errors.
• A pre-hung leaf cannot be reversed on site. On a pre-hung unit the hinge mortises and the latch bore are factory-cut to the specified handing. Order the wrong one and installing it correctly requires reworking frame components, not turning the leaf over.
• The error is invisible until it is expensive. Wrong handing is routinely reported as one of the most common procurement errors in door hardware, and the published failure modes are not subtle: locksets installed backwards with the keying on the wrong face, closers mounted on a face that interferes with the swing, exit devices opening in the wrong direction.

"Grade 1" is six different tests on six different standards

Wholesale enquiries almost always contain the phrase "Grade 1 hardware". It is the least useful phrase in the document, for a reason that takes one table to explain: the grade is defined per component, against a different standard number, with a different cycle count, and the same grade on six components is six different test results.

Now the part that makes "Grade 1" unusable on its own. The table above is one manufacturer's published list. Other publishers give different figures for the same standard and grade: we found the Grade 1 cycle count for bored locks published as both one million and eight hundred thousand, and the Grade 1 figure for closers published as both two million and one and a half million. We are not going to adjudicate between them, and we are not quoting either as a specification. We are pointing at the disagreement, because it proves the rule: a grade without a standard number and an edition is an adjective.

The second half of the problem is the function number, and this is where wholesale orders actually go wrong. A commercial lever lock looks like one product; the two- or three-character function code on the order form decides how the door behaves. Published function lists include passage, where both levers are always free; privacy, lockable from inside with emergency release; entry, where a key locks or unlocks from outside and the inside lever is always free; classroom, where the outside lever can be locked in either position; storeroom, where the outside lever is always locked and the inside is always free for egress; and institutional, where both levers are keyed. Get the function wrong and the published consequence is blunt: returning and reordering a commercial lever lock that has already been installed typically costs more in labour than the hardware itself.

Two more things belong in the same breath. Fit is decided by three dimensions that have nothing to do with grade: backset, cross bore and door thickness, and published guidance notes that commercial locks generally do not ship with the adjustable latch that residential sets use. And grading should be applied per opening rather than per building; one published guide calls uniform grading across a building the specification error that costs the most, because nobody needs the heaviest grade on a linen closet and nobody should accept the lightest on a corridor leaf that opens a few hundred times a day.

The number that moves the price is doors per type, not doors

Go back to the last row of the schedule. Quantity per type is defined in published guidance as the count of identical doors, with the reason given in the same cell: repetition lowers the unit price. That single line explains more about wholesale quoting than any price table will.

Here is an arithmetic example, and we will label it clearly as ours rather than as anyone's published data. Take two hundred leaves on one project. In the first case they resolve into six types. In the second they resolve into forty. The total is the same, the nominal area is close to the same, and the second order is the more expensive one to make, for reasons that have nothing to do with material:

• forty first articles instead of six, and the first leaf of a type is where the drawing, the sample, the set-up and the check all live;
• forty handing decisions instead of six, each one a separate chance to be wrong, and each one unreturnable;
• forty hardware sets to assemble, pick and keep together through packing;
• and a packing list in which almost every line is a quantity of one, which is where wholesale logistics starts losing money quietly.

There is a second arithmetic hiding here, and it catches people who did the first one correctly. Minimums attach to a type or a finish, not to the order. One published interior door guide states that its lacquered door sets start from thirty doors. Ten types of three doors each may not reach the minimum for any one of them, even though the project comfortably clears thirty doors in total. Asking "what is your minimum" without asking "minimum of what" is how a wholesale buyer gets a quote that looks fine and arrives as three separate production runs.

One more sequencing trap belongs in this section because it is a schedule line that becomes a slab. Published guidance on double-action doors notes that floor springs must be cast into the slab, so they have to be decided before the floor is poured, and calls it a classic site-sequencing trap. That is a handing and hardware decision that has to be made before concrete, not before delivery.

Three failures that only exist at wholesale scale

Each of these is a small error at quantity one and a programme-level event at quantity two hundred. None of them is a manufacturing defect, which is exactly why they are the ones that recur.

The handing split nobody counted

Enquiries are usually sent as a total with an assumption that the split is roughly half and half. The building rarely is. The count per hand is a number that exists on the schedule and nowhere else, and it is discovered in the wrong order: not when the order is placed, but when the crates are opened against a floor plan. By then the handed hardware is non-returnable and the leaves are machined.

The set number that was never written down

Without a numbered hardware set, "stainless" and "heavy duty" are words that two suppliers can satisfy differently, and a project can end up with three finishes across openings that were meant to be identical. The remedy is unglamorous and universally recommended: a set number, and behind it a sheet listing each item on its own row. The number is what makes the column mean something.

The re-order cliff

Year five. Three leaves are damaged and need replacing. At that point the order can only be reproduced if three things were recorded at the time: the schedule line with the leaf size in millimetres, the handing with its convention, and the hardware set number. Without them you are not re-ordering a leaf, you are commissioning a door, and the cheapest part of the job becomes the most expensive one. This is the argument for treating the schedule as a deliverable of the order rather than as a step towards it.

Six variables that must be on the order and never appear on a catalogue page

What we build, and what we will tell you we do not build

Being straight about this is quicker than being vague. ALPES has products listed under casement window, sliding window, tilt-and-turn and sliding door. Our swing door, folding door, entry door, tilt-and-slide and sun room category pages exist, and they are empty. If your schedule has a 24 folding door line on it, we will say we do not have that product rather than quote you a sliding door as though it were the same thing.

That is not an exit from this article, because the six variables are not swing-door variables. They are opening variables, and our own catalogue has to answer most of them:

• Which leaf moves. Our side-press sliding window is offered as one fixed plus one movable, or middle fixed with two sides movable. That is the handing decision of a sliding window, and it has to be written down per opening exactly as LH or RH does.
• Which side the screen sits on. An inward-opening mesh sash is a second leaf with its own cycle count and its own reach. It changes what you touch every day and it has to be settled before machining.
• Which handle. Where a handle option exists, it is a choice between a baseless ninety-degree handle and a side-mount handle, and it belongs on the order rather than in a note.
• Frame wall width against the real wall. Our published frame wall widths run from ninety millimetres on the passive tilt-and-turn, through one hundred and sixteen on one casement series, one hundred and thirty on the side-press window, to one hundred and eighty-two on a three-track sliding door. That number is the depth of the frame into the wall; it is not the thickness of your wall, and the honest way to choose it is to send the build-up rather than a single figure.
• Track height as a threshold decision. A low track at eight millimetres, a high track at forty-three, and a high-ｄｒｏｐ bottom track at forty-five with an optional eighty-five millimetre water barrier are three different relationships with the floor and with water. The outer track is designed to hold water; crossing the inner dam is what counts as a leak. This has to be settled while the slab is still a line on a drawing.
• Capacity is not a maximum size. A published driving capacity exists for one sliding door series and a published load capacity for another, and they are not the same measurement, so putting them in one sorted column is the fastest way to misread a catalogue. Both are also quoted per sash and both depend on the glass, which means the number changes the moment the glass does.

What we publish, and what you still have to ask for

Ten lines to send with the enquiry

Questions buyers actually ask

Is wholesale just a lower price for the same door?

No. Wholesale changes which mistakes are available to you, and the price mechanism is repetition of identical units rather than total volume. Two orders of the same size can carry different unit prices simply because one has six types and the other has forty. That is why the schedule's last column exists.

Can I just say "left hand" and let the factory work it out?

You can, and it is one of the most reported procurement errors in door hardware. Published guidance disagrees on which side you stand on to determine the hand, and the North American and European systems are not the same. State the letter, the viewpoint and the standard, and send the plan.

Does "Grade 1 hardware" cover the whole door?

It covers one component tested against one standard. Hinges, bored locks, mortise locks, closers and exit devices each have their own standard number and their own cycle thresholds, and even the published thresholds differ between publishers. Ask for the standard number, the edition and the function codes.

Why does the supplier keep asking for the wall build-up?

Because frames are made for walls, and a single depth figure tells the factory nothing about what that depth is made of. Send the layers from outside to inside. It is also the only way to catch a frame depth that will not suit the wall before it is delivered rather than after.

We only need three replacement leaves. Why is this so slow?

Because a leaf can only be reproduced from records: the schedule line with the manufacturing size, the handing with its convention, and the hardware set number. If those were not kept, the job is a new door rather than a repeat of an old one. That is an argument for the schedule, not against the supplier.

Do you make swing doors?

Not at present. Our listed products are casement windows, a side-press sliding window, tilt-and-turn windows and thermal-break sliding doors, and our swing door, folding door and entry door categories are empty. We would rather tell you that than substitute something that does not do the same job.

The short version

• Buy one swing door and a mistake is an installation problem. Buy two hundred and it is a logistics problem.
• A wholesale order of windows is the same window many times. A wholesale order of swing doors is many different doors sharing a catalogue page.
• Split the word first: a kitchen traffic door is a double-acting door that does not seal and is not a fire, smoke, acoustic or thermal door.
• The schedule is the order. An incomplete schedule is the most common reason quotations come back full of assumptions.
• Handing needs four letters, the viewpoint and the standard. Handed hardware is widely non-returnable, and a pair is one left plus one right, not two of the same.
• "Grade 1" is five different tests on five different standards. Ask for the number and the edition.
• Function codes decide how the door behaves. Getting one wrong after installation costs more in labour than the hardware.
• The price moves with doors per type, not doors. The first leaf of a type is the expensive one.
• Minimums attach to the type or the finish. Ask what the minimum is a minimum of.
• Floor springs have to be decided before the slab is poured. So do thresholds.
• Write down the finish code and the batch by door number, or year five will be a new colour.
• We do not build swing doors. We do build the products that have to answer the same six questions.