Tough Question! Horizontal Sliding Door!!!

[Toby96]

Ok, so I would like to make a automatic sliding door,
I have seen all the ones available on the internet and they are about £100, there, unfortunetly are not any i have seen for horizontal doors

I have decided to try and make one.
Need ideas as I am not an electrician or a carpenter. I have a design in mind and the image below is that design,

I just need any of your amazing knowlage to help this work, i.e what to buy (brands, products), from where, and how would be best to put it together.

 

[patandchickens]

Really the easiest thing would be to change your door to be vertically opening

If you are set on horizontal for whatever reason, IMO your best bet is to adapt one meant for vertical closing (the expensive commercial one, or Rob's homemade one [search this site for 'homemade door opener' posts by Nifty, that'll find you the thread]).

It would probably work best to first make your door VERY free-moving (perhaps use commercial ballbearing-drawer-slider tracks, behind boards for extra predatorproofing security), and then just add a pulley and make the pull-string a loop so that when the opener opens, it pulls the door one direction and when it closes, it pulls the door the other direction.

You can certainly try to rig up your own by other means but it has proven difficult to do without spending a lot *more* than ont he commercial unit, so, a lot of people would like to hear about it if you succeed

Good luck, have fun,

Pat

 

[Toby96]

Thanks a lot, I'm mainly looking for it to open the door, not close it as I am always around in the evenings to do that but thanks for the advice!

 

[Lucky Ducky]

One problem you will have is that bedding and poop will get in the tract that the door runs on. I've got babies in my MIL's greenhouse and I am ALWAYS having to clean the tract out, even having to put the door back on track because of the poop and other debris.

 

[patandchickens]

The way to avoid stuff jamming in the track of a horizontal sliding door is to have the bottom track OPEN at the bottom, with the door suspended from the top track. So that all the bottom track is doing is keeping the door from being pushed in/out, you know? But anything that falls into the 'track' space just falls the rest of the way out the bottom. The only way that'll jam is if so much litter piles up against the wall there that the track is deeply covered, which doesn't usually happen so much right around the pophole anyhow.

Good luck, have fun,

Pat

 

[Toby96]

Really good idea, thanks guys, so I need some sort of timer, so I can set it to open about sunrise? A motor that is connected to the timer to pull the door open?