Video: Understanding Fabric and Metal Awnings

HAYWARD — Alexander McCausland: One of our flagship items is the traditional fabric awning. There are numerous customization options that you can get with the fabric awning, this one in specific has a loose hanging valance, which we can texture in different options from a straight balance to these bridges right here, even doing more of an ocean wave curve.

One of the pros for the fabric awning is that you have a variety of textures that you can select for the surface of the fabric. Doesn’t have to be just one solid color. We have tweed, we have stripe textures. This is an example of our stripe texture right here and it’s typically installed on a square one inch by one-inch metal frame. As far as the frame goes, we’ll do a painting options available. This one is a blue frame, and a lot of painting is done in-house.

One of the advantages of the fabric awning is that we can actually print graphics on it for commercial businesses, which they like, they can use by way of a simple text graphic that would illustrate the name of the business, or we can do a more detailed artistic logo. The fabric on the awning is secure through a pocket that is sewn in to the inside of a frame and a wire is put through and then tacked to the frame with self-drilling screws and this is what we call wire tack. Now the advantage of the wire tack is that you can see, it gives you a nice straight line, even screw spacing that it looks aesthetically pleasing, and it’s very symmetrical as opposed to some of the other ways of attaching fabric to a frame. On average, the fabric for a fabric awning will last about 20 years with the only reason for a recover being that either the color has faded or just over time, if a fabric awning is around foliage or vegetation and plant matter can collect and form sort of green splotches or just discoloration on the fabric. And we do recovers as well. It’s pretty standard and they’re pretty simple and easy.

The other type of frame that we can do apart from our traditional fabric awning is a metal awning. And typically our metal awnings will come in the art panel, which is illustrated here by these two red sections. Or we have the standing seam variant, which is illustrated by these two blue sections. The advantage to the metal frame over the fabric frame is that there’s very little maintenance. These can be cleaned just by running a hose over them, or just brushing it off with a broom. There’s not as much variety by way of the stripes or the tweed textures on the panels, but we do all the in-house painting. In any sort of solid color that you can think of, we can probably paint the panel for that color. Any size panel can fit these, they’ll be assembled on the panel in an interlocking manner such as this right here, and when they’re interlocking and attached to each other, it forms a seamless transition from the start to the end of the awning and will give the look of one continuous sheet of metal over the face of the awning.

Now, as for the standing seam, it’s much the same thing, except without these textures that interlock at any sort of section, these interlock in one section where we would have these clips right here installed on the frame, and then the other panel would lock into these clips right over them like that.

So, typically the metal awnings are a lot more durable than the fabric awnings. They can take a lot more abuse in terms of the elements because of the paint and because of how we receive the material. There’s no sort of rust or anything that would happen to the metal awnings. You won’t be able to punch a hole through this as easily as you would with the fabric awnings if there was any sort of high winds and a branch would fall through. And these don’t need to be recovered typically, so in terms of expense, it’s a little bit more of an investment, but that’ll serve you better in the long run because we’ll have to shell out money, five, 10 years down the line for recover in case anything happens to the surface of the awning.