Aluminium Windows

This is the part of a project homeowners rarely get to watch: a raked, gable-end aluminium screen being set into a finished opening at first-floor level. The frame is offered up dry, packed off the structure, checked for plumb and level, and only then fixed and glazed.

Everything about the sequence is deliberate. The deck is boarded and the working area kept to one side so the finished surfaces below are never used as a workbench. Packers carry the load at fixed points rather than the frame being pulled square with fixings. The apex angle is cut and jointed in the factory to the surveyed pitch, so nothing is adapted on site.

This is the stage homeowners feel every single day for the next twenty years, and the one that separates a competent fit from a genuinely good one. The frames are in, the units are glazed, and the installer is now running each panel end to end by hand — repeatedly — to prove the track, the rollers and the interlocks before anything is signed off.

What you are watching is a test, not a demonstration. A correctly commissioned sliding panel moves with one hand, at the same effort from one end of the run to the other, and stops dead where you let go of it. Any change in resistance across the track means the cill is not perfectly level or the rollers need setting, and that is corrected now — while the building is still open and everything is accessible.