Replacing Shipping Container Doors - You'll See Why We Don’t Recommend It! | The Container Guy
In this video, watch as we struggle to replace a shipping container door with a new one.
This kind of project requires at least two other helpers, a welder, and four hinge butts and hinge pins to reinstall the door. It’s not as easy as removing sea can doors, so we don’t recommend it if you have other options.
You can either weld the doors shut and install a roll up door in the end wall, or you can remove the container doors and install a shutter door/roll up door in its place.
VIDEO
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YouTube Video Transcript
In this video, we're going to show you, we have a used 40-foot shipping container here
and the door down at the bottom is all damaged.
We could repair this door, but we found this is a great opportunity to remove this door.
We have a brand new door kicking around, so we're going to install that instead.
We're also going to give you a rough idea on what this is going to cost, and let you
follow along as we tackle the problem and show you all of the cool parts that we have
available that make this job a lot easier than it otherwise would be.
So, what we're doing here is we have a used container. So this container is 10-plus years old,
and then we're taking the brand new door and installing it on here.
So, here on this door, [it] looks like probably a forklift or something has pushed a fork
right in and damaged the entire bottom of this door.
The door is still sagging, and even the footer of this container here is actually torn, so.
We'll see if we can pull that back out and do a new weld on that corner casting.
Still kind of nice and level and would seal up even if that wasn't repaired
Biggest problem here is the door.
So what we're going to do is cut this door right off, and the way to do that is we take
a zip disc, your thinnest one, I think it's .045 or 1/16", and we'll run that right between
the hinge and the keeper on the door frame and just cut the pin out of the door.
Actually, I have one right here, so there's a cold rolled 12mm pin that's welded on both sides.
Big thing to note here, super safety concern, is that you need to have the levers closed.
So have the door uh latched shut when you do this.
Then, when you do cut those and you're ready to drop it, [make sure] you have a second
set of hands, two people will open this up, lay the door down, and safely get it out of the way.
Where are you gonna get a set of doors if yours are damaged? And so, if you find other
The Container Guy's just like us in your local area that modify shipping containers, odds
are they've done a mod where they've chopped some container doors off and they will sell them to you.
Some people have tons of them laying around, others it's a bit more of a rare commodity, so.
I think you can budget paying between $100 to $500 for a set of doors.
And then we do sell the hinge butts with the hinge pin, the whole package, and then that's
going to get you set up to perform this R&R very easily.
The beauty about using these new hinge butts is that if you find a door and your hinges
aren't in the exact spot of where the old door was, it doesn't matter.
With these, if you had a hinge right here, you can just cut into this, [and the hinge]
just welds right on the corner [post] and now your hinges can be anywhere.
Another thing to note here is that you also have door keepers.
And this is potentially more important is that your new set of doors, you want to make
sure that [the keepers] are in the same spot.
And one thing you'll notice here is that this is an older container and it's got the, the
dual lock rods where the new container has the single handle door lever, which is a lot
easier to open and close but it's going to render the keeper closest to the hinge side useless, so.
We're hoping everything there lines up.
[Channing] We're gonna look like idiots.
Now it's time just to get the hinge butts and the hinge pin lined up and in the door.
You line up the hinge pin or the hinge butt.
It's super important: [the hinge is] offset one way, you don't want to do it the wrong
way because that gives extra clearance and allows for the door to fully close and swing open.
You want the flat side to the hinge side and the offset towards the door.
And so we'll get this lined up.
The tolerances are pretty tight, so we actually have to pound the pin in.
Then we just finish it with the punch.
And so now we got about half the material thickness in the top and the bottom, and we'll
be able to just plug that with weld.
And then, when you do cut the slot for your hinges, you can be pretty exact here so you
don't have a bunch of welding and filling to do there.
So now that we have the hinge pins and hinge butts on all four of the hinges on the door,
we're gonna plug weld top and bottom, have that all done, so that when we lift the door
up to the container that's already finished.
Okay, I'm actually latched, kind of--Uh oh!
We're going to look like idiots.
[Will] Yeah. Oh, there it goes.
(laughs) That's not easy.
[Channing] That is not the easy button.
So we're catching the, the bottom there and the top there.
We figured out that the top one's actually fine if we go up with the door, which we see
we have to do with the hinges, and that's going to sit nice in that keeper up there.
But this bottom one is definitely too low, so we need to either cut it off and weld it
up higher, or it could be potentially because this footer is damaged and pushed in that
it's actually kind of pulled itself downwards, so.
We're gonna remove this door, address this issue, and then try holding it back up and
hopefully we got it in the right spot.
So before you make any extreme modifications to the uh the keepers or anything by cutting
them off and moving them, you wanna make sure that your doors are nice and square and the
container is kind of sitting where it needs to be.
And I can tell that on this container it's not because, you see where it typically normally
rides on the boat, this is you know a quarter inch down.
So what this is telling me is on the left hand side of the can, we need to get our container
jacker under there, lift this thing up so that the door seal is sitting up to where
it kind of wants to be, and then once we get it to a place where it should be, then we
can start installing the other door.
Don't do that ahead of time because if you start making modifications and you're not
even sitting level anyway, you're just constantly chasing your tail as you solve one problem
you're creating another one.
So since we made a significant adjustment by jacking up the one side, we're gonna hold
this door up again and uh see how everything's lining up.
You never know, maybe it'll actually latch now for us, so we don't want to make any changes
prior to testing it out one more time.
And we are smarter this time, we got a third set of hands here, so Matt, William and I
will lift this thing up right now.
You want to grab [it] here?
So yeah, as you can see this is not for the faint of heart.
There's three of us here, we're all kind of working together, problem solving, trying
to get this door to go in.
That's why a lot of times I don't suggest swapping out your container doors.
Often it's easier, you know, weld them shut and put a roll-up door in the other end if
they don't work, or remove the doors and install like a roll shutter door or a roll-up door
in the door end because, if you're not The Container Guy and you're not dealing with
this stuff every day, and you're not good at problem solving, or you don't have two
helping hands, this is a big job.
I feel like we're closer than we were before anyway.
What about that pry bar, Matt?
[Matt] Oh, it [doesn't] fit.
[Channing] What [doesn't]?
[Channing] Yeah, we were before too.
[Matt] ...by like a quarter inch or something, or a half inch.
So we've confirmed our suspicions and we're going to keep the top keeper because that's
going to lift the door up.
If you see a gap here, we'd like to close that up, be about half and half.
What we're going to do is we're going to cut the bottom keeper off.
That's going to leave us with only the top left keeper because it's a single handle door
and it doesn't use the, the right one.
Anyway, let's try this again.
We're going to lift her up one more time, hopefully this is good, get it locked in the
top keeper. If that works, we'll weld that bottom one back on.
[Channing] Yeah, look at that.
Yeah, it's actually sitting in there nicer than we expected.
Now that the one is out, we can grab [the keeper] here.
Yeah okay, there you go. Yep!
This is the moment of truth, here.
We have all the hinge butts tacked in place, and we've retacked the uh the bottom keeper
in place, so we're just gonna try to open up this door.
Hopefully nothing falls here and everything's working properly.
That door seal's sitting nice and tight there.
Seems to be swinging pretty good.
We'll just see if it closes back up.
So, I think we're happy with where this is sitting.
Now it's just uh, we'll let William finish welding it all up.
And so here we got the container out of the shop.
You can see that we've added a coat of paint on the doors just so that it matched the rest
of the can, it's not tan and doesn't stick out like a sore thumb.
The left door of this container also had a bit of damage, so we removed the bottom door seal.
We had to cap the underside of the door and weld in some new material there.
And then we reinstalled some door seal to make sure that it closed up and sealed up nicely.
Just to give you an idea on how this thing works here.
Yeah, that's basically it.
That's how we either replace a container door or repair container doors.
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