Recently, Maybrook Fire District acquired a forcible entry door from our friends at Firehouse Innovations Corp. Mike the owner of Firehouse Innovation Corp. along with David, one of the instructors, are veteran FDNY firefighters with over 45 years of experience who designed and built our forcible entry door. 

As a volunteer department, we don’t have the luxury of training as often as full time paid firefighters. Obviously, that makes becoming more experienced firefighters a challenge. With the forcible entry door, we can run our own drills to continue learning and practice various techniques in order to be better prepared for just about any forcible entry situation.

We couldn’t be any happier with our door. Not only do we have a great training tool, the various videos Mike and David put out have provided lessons on various ways to access different facilities with numerous configurations.

One scenario we encountered is forcible entry via a commercial door or a fire door in a confined space. In order to gain access, we must force the forks of the halligan tool between the door and the metal frame. This requires that we firmly hit the adz end of the halligan in order to get the forks in deep enough to provide the mechanical leverage needed for entry.  

With two people and enough space to swing the ax this is a relatively simple task. However, in tight quarters there may not be enough room to properly and safely swing the axe.

A solution to that problem is to place the axe onto the halligan’s shaft, which is used as a guide to hit the shoulders and force the forks into the door jam. Unfortunately all of our halligans had rounded shoulders making this impossible.

Thanks to Mike and David’s years of knowledge and experience, we were given a great recommendation. Shave the rounded sections of the shoulders flat. Honestly, the thought of grinding our halligan was the furthest time from our minds. However, the suggestion was one we couldn’t pass on so we did it on one of our halligans and tested it.

This was one of the modifications suggested which created the perfect surface needed for a solid hit on the shoulders. It was an easy and relatively quick fix for dealing with forcible entry on a metal door in a confined space.

Seeing is believing so have a look at the comparison video.

There are several other recommendations for enhancing our halligans which we will share as we continue training, testing and building our arsenal. So come back for updates, link up with us on FB and the Gram and be safe out there.

Written by MBKFD RedCoats