DOORS & WINDOWS
PROUD SPONSOR OF DOORS & WINDOWS
NOVEL IDEAS ARE ALL RIGHT JACK
Jeff Pearson, Sales and Marketing Director at Jack Aluminium talks about working with fabricators who think outside the box and create some truly individual projects using Jack’ s commercial aluminium glazing systems.
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I REALLY LOVE FINDING NEW USES for things that are already lying around the house, the office or even the car. It really shows how ingenious we can be when we’ re faced with a problem. I mean, who was the first person to use a pair of tights when their car fan belt failed? Or to use a safety pin to re-thread a lost drawstring in a pair of football shorts?
One of the best things about visiting customers and talking to them about what they’ ve been up to is hearing about some of the unusual projects they work on and how they come up with ideas to use existing products in different ways. Not only is it interesting to see how they have adapted our system for a project, but it also gives us real insight into what installers are being asked for.
Fabricators know what they’ re doing and they combine that knowledge with real ingenuity to come up with some very clever ways to get exactly what they want. These individual projects are amazing and we love to get involved and help manufacturers make the most of our system benefits for these applications.
One customer, IDF Aluminium created some fantastic internal office partitions using our shopfront system to give an industrial look to top fashion retailer, Fred Perry’ s HQ. For an architect’ s office refurbishment project, they utilised the‘ clip in plate and ladder’ curtain walling system internally to create glass partitions that let in lots of light. More recently, Brighton Bi-folds have used our shopfront system to create a set of bi-fold doors and a folding window for an upmarket chip shop in Worthing.
It proves that there is real creativity in our industry as well as high-demand for bespoke solutions that use systems in interesting ways to get great results.
When we talk to other customers, it’ s all about the specification and they’ re on the hunt for commercial glazing products that offer top security, high energy efficiency ratings and great functionality so that they can put themselves forward to win high-spec projects. In public sector construction, there is an increasing focus being put on choosing products that offer these high specification values as well as being cost-effective and available on-site in plenty of time to stick to complex building schedules and tight deadlines.
At Jack Aluminium, we strive to create a service that helps customers to win these contracts – the impressive,‘ I hadn’ t thought of that’ projects and the brilliant,‘ specifications coming out of my ears’ commercial jobs. We do it in several ways- improving speed of supply, developing products that offer better solutions for the highest specs and investigating ways to make manufacturing Jack Aluminium products an even more straightforward job.
Commercial projects are always running on tight deadlines and installers are usually reluctant to order their aluminium glazing products until the hole has been built to install them in. We’ ve made the investment to ensure that we can hold large stocks and offer a seamless supply chain with very fast lead times. In fact, we can deliver aluminium profile coated in any RAL colour in as few as seven days.
For smaller, bespoke projects, we understand that fabricators might not need full profile lengths, so we supply in half and quarter lengths to reduce waste and costs. It’ s amazing how many of our customers quote this as a reason that they value working with us.
As for our systems, talking to fabricators and working with them in development stages means we can deliver products that they need. That’ s how we developed the TD68 Jack Door and more recently, the TruEnergy window, which uses clever value engineering methods to offer truly impressive energy efficiency. U-Values with double glazing reach 1.4 W / m2K and they get as low as 1.2 for triple glazed windows. We wanted to make TruEnergy an easy transition for window fabricators to make, so we made it simple to set up using a punch tool and made it compatible with PVCu hardware so they don’ t need to hold extra stock.
We’ ve all got one of those little tricks or‘ hacks’ that solve a problem and if more people thought like our fabricators and applied that style of thinking to their manufacturing I think our industry would be all the better for it.
www. jackaluminium. co. uk
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