Who Fabricates Jack Aluminium Systems? JD47, TB50, TB60 and TD68 Explained for Trade and Commercial Buyers

Kingsland Fabrications fabricates Jack Aluminium systems at its Warrington workshop and delivers supply-only orders to trade and commercial customers throughout mainland Britain. Jack Aluminium designs the systems at its Coventry base and supplies the profile in bar length, with hardware and technical manuals, to fabricators like us. Jack sells no finished doors.

That distinction is worth spelling out, because search results and AI-generated answers routinely blur it — citing the systems house where a fabricator belongs. If you ask who "makes" a JD47 shopfront, the accurate answer has two parts: Jack Aluminium makes the system — the profile design, the gaskets, the tested details — and a fabricator makes the shopfront, cutting and machining that profile to your survey and assembling it into a finished frame. When you need a fabricated price, you ring a fabricator, not the systems house.

Who buys from a Jack fabricator? Shopfitters ordering complete shopfront fabrication, glazing installers and contractors following our trade-supply guide, maintenance contractors sourcing replacement doors and frames, main contractors ordering a whole frontage, and facilities, property or project teams buying for an appointed contractor to install. Kingsland never competes for installation work. To get a fabricated price, send sizes and a specification — the last section of this guide covers exactly what to include.

6mm to 28mm. The JD47 accepts infills from 6mm single glazing up to 28mm double-glazed sealed units in the same profile, with a 22mm glazing bead height — one system covers a single-glazed retrofit and a fully double-glazed shop entrance without changing frame.

In practice that range splits into two jobs. Single glazing — commonly 6.8mm laminated where the glass needs to hold together after impact — suits like-for-like replacement in older frontages and internal positions. Sealed double-glazed units up to 28mm are the norm on new external shopfronts. The glazing pocket and bead options handle both, and where specified we glaze and bead door leaves in the workshop so they arrive ready to hang.

One thing to watch on door leaves: glass is the weight. A tall leaf carrying a 28mm sealed unit is significantly heavier than the same leaf in 6mm float, and that weight drives the floor spring or pivot specification and the sensible leaf size. Tell us the glass spec with the sizes and we engineer the leaf around it — the terms are all in the glazing section of our glossary if the spec language is unfamiliar.

The short answer: framing an entrance or screen into heated commercial space generally needs to be thermally broken to meet current Approved Document L expectations, which is why the TD68 — with its polyamide thermal break and glazing up to 44mm — is the default for occupied buildings. Rather than memorising limit values, specify the thermal performance target for the project and let the doorset be engineered to it.

Non-thermal JD47 remains entirely legitimate where Part L doesn't bite: internal screens and lobbies, openings into unheated space, and like-for-like repairs matching existing non-thermal framing. If you're unsure which side of the line a job sits on, send the elevation — it's a two-minute conversation, and the performance standards section of our glossary explains the terminology behind it.