Brian Watson talks about the three Modernfold Acousti-Seal Legacy Paired Panel operable partitions that are installed at the Rockford Public Library.

TRANSCRIPT

Good morning, I’m Brian Watson with Modernfold Chicago. Today I’m at the Rockford Public Library. We’re in the third floor meeting room space where they have three Modenfold Acousti-Seal Legacy paired panel operable partitions installed. It gives the library and the city the flexibility to host a variety of public and private events while accommodating various head counts and multiple parties if needed.

We’re going to start today with demonstrating just how to operate these partitions. They’re all fairly typical, so we’ll start here with the southernmost partition. First step is to open the pocket doors. You’ll see these are equipped with locks. We’ve already unlocked them for ease of demonstration. First thing, you want to make sure that you don’t have any obstructions in the ceiling that your pocket door may hit. If you’ll notice down here, we do have some lighting controls, so we want to make sure that we’re not going to open the doors too widely to interfere with that. Looks like we’re good. After opening the first leaf, the second leaf does have a drop foot bolt that is going to secure the partition to the floor, so we’re going to reach in and lift that to release that door. Paired panels are going to come out hinged in pairs or twos. So when we reach in to grab these panels, we want to make sure that we grab the second panel, not just the first panel. These are tall partitions as well. They’re just over 15 feet tall. So we’re going to want to grab as high on the panel as we can to prevent the panels from swinging out on us. Once we remove them from the pocket, we can go ahead and unfold the pair of panels and slide them down into place.

We have a lead receiver jam that we’re going to line that first panel in and it’ll nest properly. Bottom seals are going to be manually operated, so we’re going to use our operating crank, insert it into the trail edge of the trail panel, and rotate down to drop the bottom seal. You’ll notice the first panel has a pass door in it, so we’re going to go ahead and manually drop the pass door legs. We’ll open the door 90 degrees, that’ll provide access to the operating mechanisms for the pass door bottom seals. First, we’re going to lower the door seal itself. The door seal is designed to float off the floor about a quarter of an inch, so once we get about a quarter of an inch from the floor, we’re going to stop. There is a plunger on the back side of this door that once you close the door, it will force the seal down to give you a nice acoustic seal when the door is in the closed position. We’ll also go ahead and lower the legs of the pass door. Simply repeat the process for the next several pairs of panels.

The last pair of panels is going to be a little bit different. We’re going to pull these panels out. We’re going to keep them perpendicular to the track and then we’re going to go ahead and close the closet doors. The closet doors are acoustically rated and they will be the terminating point for the last panel. We’ll remember to go ahead and drop that foot bolt to stabilize these panels. Once that is complete, we’ll go ahead and open up this last pair of panels. You do have a handle here to help you get these panels to go flat and fit the puzzle piece into place here. You’ll notice the last panel has two operating discussions. The top of discussion is going to operate your expandable panel mechanism, which is going to seal the wall completely. The bottom is going to operate the bottom seals. So we’re going to crank this nosing out right to about there until we get right at the face of the door, and then we’re going to go ahead down and drop the bottom seals. Once the bottom seals are down, we’ll go ahead and return to the top discussion and give it another crank and a half or so to tighten the wall completely.

Once the wall is ready to be taken down, the operation is basically going to be reversed. We’re going to go ahead, relieve some of the tension off the expandable. Bring our bottom seals up and then completely retract the expandable panel. We’re going to push on the hinge joints to fold these panels. Go ahead and open up our pocket doors. Again we’re going to be mindful of any surrounding construction and we’re simply going to stack the panels back into the closet. The intermediates will simply raise the bottom seals. Again pushing on the hinge joint to fold the panels and just repeat the process. When we’re taking down the pass door pair, we’re going to want to start with the pass door panel, leaving the trail seal in placed just to stabilize this panel while we, while we raise the seals on the pass door. Last step in the operation is just going to go ahead and close the pocket doors. Again, remembering to secure that back leaf with the foot bolt. Now we’re complete.

Hey there again. We’ve jumped on to the second floor. We’re in the library’s teen zone space where they host a variety of activities for the community’s teens. It’s a little bit different feel than the third floor. We still have high open ceilings. But we are oriented on the corner of the building. So you’ll see a lot of windows, a lot of nice natural daylight is coming in. They’ve opted for a lot of whites and clean aesthetic. With the operable partition, they have chosen the same. So it’s a little bit different. They’ve opted for the Premier product line versus the Legacy. The Premier allows us to utilize a plastic laminate finish. These panels are just over 14 feet tall, so you will see a splice joint. That’s because the laminate is only available in 12 -foot sections. You’ll notice we have a nice wood trim window, all done at the factory by Modernfold’s factory personnel. Operationally, it’s going be a paired panel as well as the third floor. So let’s go ahead and show you how to operate it.

Again, we’re going to want to go ahead and grab around two panels at a time, pull them away from the stacking area. You do have some impediments in the ceiling that you’ve got to be careful on. Some of the lighting fixtures here could potentially conflict with the if you leave them perpendicular to the track. So we’re going to go ahead and open them up as quickly as we can, being mindful of the stack panels behind us. We’ll go ahead and run them down the line, again aligning with the lead receiver jam. Similar manual bottom seals as we saw on the third floor. We’ll insert our crank and drop the seals and repeat the process four panels two through six.