Garage Door Manufacturing: ABB Robots on the Panel Line

Garage door manufacturing turns coils of steel into a door that must be light enough to lift, stiff enough to hold its shape and good looking from the street. A sectional door is built from hinged panels, and each panel is cut, formed, filled, coated and stacked before it ever reaches a house. This post follows that line from the sliding doors of 1921 and the first sectional door in 1923 to today's robotic coating booths. It then asks where ABB robots could fit. We found no source naming ABB in a garage door plant, so that part is a possibility.

A wood-look sectional garage door with horizontal panels on a stone house. Photo: Modern Garage Doors / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

From sliding doors to the first sectional door

Early garages were small sheds, and their doors showed it. Sears, Roebuck's Honor Bilt Modern Homes catalogue of 1921 offers a double garage called The Speedway, "fitted with two sets of our new triple sliding garage doors." The drawing shows a small hip roofed building with its floor plan beside it, and the caption singles out the new sliding doors. That same year Owen Dautrick and C.G. Johnson applied for a patent covering "further developments in garage doors," two years before Johnson showed his sectional door.

A double garage with triple sliding doors, from Sears, Roebuck's Honor Bilt Modern Homes catalogue, 1921. Photo: Sears, Roebuck and Co. / Internet Archive Book Images via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

In 1923 Johnson displayed an operational sectional overhead door, mounted on a Model T, at the New York automobile show. In January of that year the Detroit Free Press first called the firm "The Overhead Door Company." A sectional door is a set of hinged panels guided by rollers, and some modern ones have polyurethane foam insulation inside the panels. Johnson died suddenly in 1935. The panels bend at each hinge as the door curls into the ceiling, and a factory has to make many matching panels for every door.

Inside a sectional garage door, where hinged panels bend at the top of the track. Photo: StromBer / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0 DE)

In Britain the one-piece door came first. Garador was formed in 1948 as part of Westland's Engineers, as a way to move away from military products, and it made one-piece garage doors. Westland's later bought a Canadian licence for up-and-over doors and was the only UK maker of them through the 1950s. A purpose-built garage door factory opened in Yeovil in 1958, and the first Garador-branded door was made that year. Garador is now part of the German Hörmann Group.

A blue steel garage door with horizontal panels on a house in England. Photo: TerriersFan / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.5)

Robots in the coating and finishing lines

A feature on Garador shows what the modern plant looks like. The firm is owned by the Hörmann Group, which acquired it around 2000. It uses powder coating, and its coating partner Nordson replaced an old booth with one that has robotic touch-up for hard-to-reach areas. Developing the process took 12 to 18 months, and the booth can change powder colour in about a minute. Garador says it has invested over 24 million pounds in production technology over 25 years. The page carries the dates 3 September 2025 and 15 June 2026.

A hand spray gun applying red powder coating to a steel panel in a booth. Photo: Hardcoreraveman / Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Surface treatment is moving to automation elsewhere too. An integrator, MWES, lists a project in which a leading garage door manufacturer partnered with it to automate flame treatment of large, flat panels, using a conveying system. The listing carries a timestamp of 13 October 2026 and does not name the customer, the robots or the date of the work. On 1 October 2026 PE Hub also reported on private equity firms such as Sterling Group and Point 41 backing garage door businesses, which shows investor interest in the trade.

A tall sectional door standing open at a warehouse run by Castle Hills, 2022. Photo: Castle Hills AS / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

ABB's own material is closest in its panel handling. A wood industry brochure from ABB describes four- and six-axis robots for moving planks, sheets and panels in furniture production, and it says fully automated lines give high precision and a quick return. Palletizing is the obvious match for a door line, since every finished panel ends up on a stack. ABB's IRB 660 is a palletizer, and the IRB 460 is its other palletizing arm. We found no garage door maker that names either one, so this is only a fit, not a customer story.

An ABB IRB 660 palletizing robot stacking products at the end of a line. Photo: ABB

Where garage door lines go next

Homes see the end of the line. Openers use safety sensors such as the electric eye, a small beam that stops the door if something blocks it, and the photo shows one with its red indicator lit. Style is changing as well. On 15 October 2026 GlobeNewswire carried a release headed "From Afterthought to Facade Centerpiece: Austin-Based Kosper Doors Redefines the Garage Door." Doors that are designed as part of a facade come in more colours and finishes, and a factory that must paint, cut and pack many variants needs flexible cells.

The electric eye safety sensor on a garage door opener, with its red indicator lit. Photo: Jud McCranie / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

In the factory, the open problems are variety, cost and skills. Nordson's booth at Garador can change powder colour in about a minute, but handling dozens of sizes, finishes and window options at once is harder for a robot than a single panel. A small door maker must also weigh the price of a cell against the number of jobs it will replace. Programs are built and tested in RobotStudio before they run on the shop floor, which lets a team check a cell before it is built, but it still takes trained staff.

ABB's GoFa cobot with its arc welding package on a welding table. Photo: ABB

Possible ABB uses are easy to list and hard to prove. A GoFa cobot with the arc welding package could weld small brackets and hinges, an IRB 5500 could spray liquid coatings in a booth built for explosive air, and a palletizer could stack doors. ABB has not announced any of this for garage doors. Each idea would need trials with a real door maker, on real panels, before anyone could say it pays. For related reading, see how ABB robots palletize at the end of a line and how paint robots moved from car bodies to walls.

An ABB IRB 5500 paint robot, a design built to work in explosive paint-booth air. Photo: ABB

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