Violentum IV Garage Door- Crash Resistance

Our Violentum IV series of garage doors provides one element of protection that the Violentum III garage doors do not…and that is CRASH RESISTANCE!

In our research and development of our bullet resistant garage door, one thing was constant; The security industry’s requests for some level of crash protection. With our hurdles of structural integration between our ballistic materials, we became aware of the extreme tenacity of our ballistic materials. And from this realization, we felt convinced that we would be able to use the natural tenacity for something more then just stopping bullets.

We did run into some significant changes in the creation of these panels. The first, how to bond the bullet resistant garage door panels together while using dissimilar materials. And second, how does that rigid structure material interact with a bullet resistant garage door system that is continuously opening and closing. It took us months to not only create the panel concept, but then we decided to practically invent the forming and fastening process as there was nothing available like it in the United states.

So, with a lot of research and innovation, we ended up overnighting techniques from Belgium to achieve the fastening techniques between materials that we desired. The entire process provided some extreme challenges, but with ingenuity we were able to work through them.

The next step in our development of a crash resistant bullet resistant garage door was to do a baseline crash test to be able to prove the viability of our product. We started researching ways of crashing a vehicle into our ballistic garage door. We ended up developing our own track by utilizing a cantilever gate track as a way to keep the vehicle straight. For the part that would ride within the track, we machined a custom carriage with high speed bearings and 3D printed wheels.

We were able to find a Ford Ranger pickup truck with a bad transmission. It’s empty weight was 3100 pounds and we put a payload on it of 1600 pounds. We then attached another vehicle to the carriage to provide acceleration to the crash vehicle. With this carriage, accompanied with a pully system, we were able to get the vehicle up to 23 mph. And, as we suspected, our ballistic garage door stopped!

With this initial test, we are able to provide a SC30 protection at a P1 with our smaller crash garage door; the Violentum IV Level 3. And with that being said, we cannot wait to see what our big guy can handle; the Violentum IV Level 8!