If you have already removed your sliding door screen, lay it down on a flat surface with lots of room around you. Screen repair shops use a 4' x 8' table often covered with carpeting to protect the screen doors painted finish. If you have no suitable table, lay the screen door on the ground on top of sheets of cardboard to prevent getting the screen door frame scratched or marked .
If you have purchased your screen material, make sure you have enough before you pull out the old screen cloth from the door. Take a strong sharp pointed pin, (I use an awl), and poke around in each corner of the door to find the end of the spline, lever it out of the channel, and grab it it with your fingers and pull it all the way out. Sometimes you wont be able to pull the spline out in one continuous length. It will keep breaking. Exposure to the sun leaves plastic spline brittle and inflexible. In those circumstances, you may have to use a utility knife to cut through the spline all around the spline channel until the spline disintegrates or comes free in small pieces. An Older sliding door screen may have aluminum or even steel spline. Aluminum spline can be pried out easily enough but it cannot be reused, so be sure you have the right diameter plastic spline on hand to replace it. Steel spline can be reused but its probably easier to consider having new modern sliding door screen frames made to replace the old steel spline frames. You need at least 84" of cloth to repair the average screen door. The width of the cloth should be a few inches wider than your door. Common widths are 30", 36" and 48" You can now remove the screen cloth which should come out in one piece. Once you have removed the cloth, use a flat blade screwdriver to clean out the spline channel so that when you roll in new spline there will be no obstructions. Sliding door screen frames have a tendency to cave in a little when the material is rolled in. Window screen frames may need to have the sides bowed out by perhaps one quarter inch to compensate for the tension of the material. Many screen doors are already bowed or cambered in the factory. Part of the skill required in screen repair is to know how much tension to put on the cloth as you roll it in, so as not to bow in the frame. If you are using fiberglas cloth, you can usually pull out the spline and start over untill you get it right. More practice is required to get aluminum cloth in properly as you cant pull it out and start over. You can clamp the door sides to a repair table to prevent them from being cambered in. The time before you roll the screen is also a good time to check the frame and the screen door rollers or glides. Check to see if they adjust up and down when the screws are tightened or released. Many rollers can only be serviced by disassembling the frame. So repair them now before spending any time re-screening. If you find the frame is beyond repair you may want to buy a new screen door. Fiberglass screen cloth is made of strands of fiberglass woven criss-cross into a mesh pattern. Typically screen cloth is woven into an 18 x 16 mesh. Which means 18 wires per inch by 16 wires per inch. Meshes are made much tighter and much looser than this but they are generally not used for window screening. The strands of fiberglass used in the weaving usually .011 inch in diameter for window screening. A thicker .013" diameter is often used for screen cloth used on screen porches. After the weaving. The cloth is dipped in a vinyl coating with additives to give the material some fire and weather resistant properties. Some cheaper brands of screen cloth omit these coatings making their material less expensive but less durable and sometimes incapable of meeting building and fire codes. The coating material can be coloured. The most common colour is black. Another common colour is grey. In recent times other colours have been experimented with to allow the screens to match the colour scheme of the house. Aluminum screen cloth is available in similiar sizes as for fiberglass. Aluminum is often called "bright wire" which refers to the shiny uncoated aluminum screen wire. This material can corrode quickly and develops a white powdery oxide coating over the years which does not look all that attractive. To combat this manufacturers have painted the standard aluminum screen black and called this "black wire". When this stuff goes in new it has the advantage of being the most "invisible" type of screen. Black aluminum screen doors are the easiest to accidently walk through ! There is also electro alodized screening which is also black but is produced using an electro chemical process which prevents corrosion better than black paint. New York Wire is a screening manufacturer who uses this process. Aluminum is stronger than fiberglass and works fine with humans but it is still not sufficient to stand up to scratching by most pets. It is suitably strong for storm door screens and is used there often. Pet proof window screens are now possible using heavy duty fiberglas tough door screen material. This material was originally used as a luggage container fabric but was found to be exceptionally resistant to pets scratching on the patio door screen to get in and get out. It might be advisable to have a glass shop install this material for you because it does require the right spline size, and is more difficult to roll in than ordinary screen fabric. If you are careful, it is not an impossible project for a do-it-yourselfer to accomplish. Just be sure to get the right spline size for your patio door. Most likely the spline size that you remove from the door will be too large to reuse with petscreen. You will probably have to go down one or two sizes to roll the new petscreen in place. With petscreen its best to preroll the material into the spline groove before you roll the spline in. Its also essential that you clamp the screen cloth on the patio screen door before starting to roll, that way you can assure that it goes in square and true. 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