other manufacturer at the time ….
other manufacturer at the time that was making something similar. Deiler designed his lead-lined doors and was able to sell them through architects who were designing and building courthouses and police stations, medical facilities, and schools. As his products became more well-known in the industry, he was able to identify specific new products for which there was a demand, and build them one by one.
“We’ve been on a continual course of creative partnering with other people,” said Protect Door General Manager Gary Johnson. “Whatever it takes to get more products that fit our niche, which is safety and security.”
Bullet-proof doors are one of the specialty products in which Protect Door excels. It has a patented 9-layer design in a door that is the only one on the market certifi ed by Underwriters Laboratory (UL), Deiler said. While most doors on the market will deflect a bullet, Protect Door has a patented product that takes safety a step further.
“Ours captures the bullet and holds it,” Johnson said. “You have to absorb all the energy.”
Protect Door’s bullet-proof models are also known for their aesthetic value. They’re not industrial-looking steel slabs, but wood-veneer covered doors that can be blended into any office design.
“It looks like any other high-quality office door. You wouldn’t know the difference,” Johnson said. “The average person cannot tell that’s a bullet door. When you close our bullet door, it closes like an office door.”
Protect Door saw a surge in orders for bullet doors as a spate of school shootings in recent years caused districts around the nation to upgrade security. More orders for bullet doors have also come in as municipalities are beefing up their protections in facilities like police stations and courtrooms.
“There’s kind of a new trend in mid-sized cities in shared resource buildings,” Johnson said. Those facilities tend to have common entry vestibules and need security doors to enter separate agencies.
“The buildings that we deal with are everywhere from prisons to schoolhouses to fire stations,” Johnson said.
And medical facilities. That’s a main source of growth for Protect Door, and it often ships sets of doors to hospital building sites to protect employees against radiation. It has also done doors for nuclear medicine storage facilities and universities that store isotopes.
“Routine” is not a word that describes many of Protect Door’s orders. It’s not in the business of supplying building projects with the hundreds of doors to common spaces, but those few unique ones that few manufacturers deal with. On a hospital job, for example, there might be an order going elsewhere for 200 regular doors, but perhaps six that need to be able to withstand radiation.
As Johnson says, any new order can be a challenge.
“We really don’t say ‘no’ to anything. We’ll look at it,” he said.
Protect Door also knows that looks are important, so it takes orders for doors with round windows or diamond windows and doors with most any shade of wood
See PROTECT DOORS on page 4
An employee at the Spencer Protect Door facility strips pieces of wood veneer together to surface a specialty door that may be used for any number of security functions.
DEAN LESAR/TRG
