Commercial Gate Rebuilt After Vehicle Impact
0:45Filmed on the job by Shield Gate Repair
What this video shows
A commercial entrance gate struck by a vehicle. Impact damage is never only the visible bend — the post was pushed out of plumb and the gate no longer travelled true, so the repair runs structure first, then alignment, then the operator, then the safety devices. Fitting a new operator to a distorted gate simply destroys the new operator too.
The fault
- A FedEx truck struck the entrance gate at a distribution facility. The gate is 35 feet of heavy-duty steel — the sort of gate that protects a yard full of freight, and the sort that a business genuinely cannot operate without.
- The customer had already had two companies out. Both recommended replacing the gate completely, and neither quoted less than $25,000.
How it was diagnosed
- Impact damage on a gate this size looks catastrophic, and that appearance does a lot of work in a replacement quote. What matters is which parts actually took the load.
- Here the damage was concentrated: the rollers the gate runs on, and two of the posts. The gate structure itself — the expensive part, the part that takes weeks to fabricate and a crane day to install — was sound.
- Replacing a structurally sound 35-foot gate because its rollers and posts were destroyed replaces the one part of the assembly that did not fail.
The fix
- We recommended repairing it, replacing only what the impact had actually damaged, and we were back the next day to do the work.
- Replaced: six 2-inch rollers, a ten-foot 4x4 post, and a 2x6 heavy-duty post.
- The price was $6,880 against estimates that started at $25,000 — and the customer received a five-year warranty on the work.
On a commercial gate the structure is almost always the most expensive component and almost never the thing an impact destroys. Rollers, posts and hardware take the load and are designed to be replaceable. Before accepting a five-figure replacement quote, it is worth asking a straight question: which parts are actually damaged, and which are being replaced because they happen to be attached to them?
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