Rebuildable door parts aim to cut IBA downtime, says Rocket Glide founder

In-bay automatic doors that fail can take a wash out of service for days while operators wait on parts and labor. Bob Blasi, founder of Rocket Glide and a nearly 40-year veteran of the industry, says that frustration pushed him to design a different approach to the carriage systems that move those doors.

Blasi laid out his thinking in a conversation recorded at The Car Wash Show 2026, according to reporting from Professional Carwashing & Detailing. As an operator of self-serve and in-bay automatic sites himself, he framed the problem around the real cost of a door that stops working: lost wash volume while a site sits idle.

A rebuildable approach to carriage systems

The central idea Blasi describes is building door carriage components to be fully rebuildable rather than replaced wholesale. When a part can be rebuilt on site, he argues, an operator can be back up and running in hours rather than waiting days for a full replacement to arrive and be installed.

He walked through the engineering behind the company's patented carriage design and explained that the carriage and cylinder products are built as direct replacements for existing Airlift Doors systems. According to the interview, the parts are designed to install without modifications to the existing setup, which lowers the barrier for operators who want to swap in new components without reworking their bays.

Blasi's pitch centers on long-term economics. Investing in rebuildable components, he contends, can deliver savings over time without giving up performance, because operators spend less on emergency replacements and lose less revenue to downtime.

Why it matters for operators

Door failures are one of the more disruptive breakdowns at an in-bay automatic site because a stuck or broken door can shut down the entire bay, not just one function. Every hour the bay is closed is lost throughput, and in cold climates an open or inoperable door can create additional problems with freezing and equipment exposure.

The practical takeaway from Blasi's argument is to evaluate replacement parts not only on upfront price but on how quickly a site can recover from a failure. Parts that can be rebuilt on location change the math on downtime, and components that drop into existing systems without modification reduce both installation time and the risk of a complicated retrofit.

Operators weighing this approach should confirm compatibility with their current door brand, understand what the rebuild process actually involves, and factor in whether their team can perform rebuilds in house or will still rely on a service call. The broader lesson applies beyond any single vendor: maintenance planning for IBA sites should account for parts availability and recovery speed, because the cost of a closed bay often dwarfs the price difference between components.