At Struts West we pride ourselves on providing common sense gas strut advice for your home handyman and professional projects that require gas struts to keep a lid open.
Gas struts are often required to keep a lid open on applications such as pool storage boxes and decking lids, kids toy boxes, caravan beds, marine deck lids, large tool boxes, canopy doors, camper trailers, etc. These jobs will require you to work out what gas strut is required, how much pressure is required in your gas struts and where to mount the gas struts for best effect. This is where Struts West can help.
As a very general rule your gas struts should be about 60% as long as the lid they are opening. So for example if you are fitting gas struts to a side canopy door and your canopy side door is 1 meter high then it would be best to mount a gas strut approximately 600mm long fully extended to provide an optimal opening and closing outcome. In this example we would be advising you to mount your gas struts approximately 280mm away from where that canopy door is hinged. There are sometimes other factors that need to be considered too and here at Struts West we will do our very best to help you with such a task.
It is also possible that your project might have a lid that when at rest is in the horizontal position on an application such as a marine deck lid or a pool storage box.. Depending on how you would like the lid to open and close we can advise lengths and mounting positions to suit. For example the pool storage box may require a slower closing so as to protect your hands as you open and close the lid while the boat deck lid probably needs to stay shut even as the boat travels along at high speed. Struts west can advise you how to best fit your gas struts so the best possible open and close notion can be obtained.