Should frameless glass shower door hinges be screwed into the wall at an angle?

Question

I recently had shower glass & door installed - but the shower door hinges have their screws (ones that go into the tile wall) are screwed in at an angle, so they do not sit flush against the hinge.

All the screws are this way except the center one, I am wondering if this is normal?

I asked the guy who installed it, he said it is purposefully done that way so that it would be able to withstand the weight of the glass door.

Some details of the project:

• This is a torn down to the studs kind of project
• There are double studs behind the tile where the hinges are
• The door is a 90 degree door

Any of you know if this is normal?

Answer 1

Any of you know if this is normal?

I would say not normal.

Looking closely at the photos i would say that if the manufacturer had wanted the screws to be at an angle then they would have set the countersinks in the brackets at that specified angle so the heads did not stick out proud of the bracket, They did not. The countersinks are straight so therefore one can assume that the screws SHOULD go in straight.

I would surmise that the installer is feeding you a line to cover his mistake.

Answer 2

Any screw installed at an angle will not be able to handle the sheer load vertically of the weight of the shower. Once it loosens and it will it will pull at a much greater rate too. Just no way.

Answer 3

If this was a retrofit, and the bathroom hasn't been torn down to the studs, my guess is that this is just how things worked out.

Probably the location where the door needed to be installed aesthetically or to make the shower leak-proof was ever so slightly NEXT TO the stud. It looks like there is one screw more towards the center of the hinge, which looks like it goes in straight. The other ones probably had to be angled slightly in order to hit the stud, or they would have just gone into drywall and wouldn't be doing anything at all really (other than probably pull your tile off the wall).

If you were fully redoing the bathroom, including removing drywall, there would have been an opportunity to place more solid blocking where the hinges needed to go, but if that wasn't the case, the next base thing would be doing this, over having the screws not hold the door up at all.

You haven't given us many details about this project, so this is just a guess of course.

Answer 4

This is ABSOLUTELY not normal, and a complete line of BS. I have been doing this for 14 years. There is no reason for that to be crooked. He drilled his pilot hole off center, and that is the only way he could get the screw to run. It actually weakens your hinge because the force is on the spine of the screw instead of the head. Also, he stripped out the other screw head probably because he was using an old tip on his impact. Sometimes the screws that come with the hinges can be poor quality, but this looks like a CRL GEN5370RB, and those install instructions say the screw should be installed flush into the countersunk back plate holes.

Answer 5

Installed hundreds of glass shower enclosures. Yes in a perfect world the screws would sit evenly flush but if you've done them for a lot of years you would know to slightly angle your hole so as when you're screwing it in with your screw gun the chuck does not rub up against the hinge and mark it up. I work with a lot of other shower eclosure installers and this seems pretty common in the trade. This looks like it might be slightly more of an angle than I would do. Most important thing to do is to make sure you hit proper Wood backing with that there would be no issues with the door. What would be more important would be if your installer did not pre shim inside the hinge to compensate for the door potentially sagging when the gaskets expand and contract

Answer 6

^^this

But also, you can tell they drilled the hinge in place, on the glass - bad practice, as only a 3/16” bit fits through those holes without enlarging them… the lazy way then mandates pre-installing your plastic anchor on the tip of the #8 wood screws that the hinge comes with, and placing that on your impact driver’s tip, and using the heel of your hand to smack the anchor through the hinge and into your hole. This leaves the little ring from the anchor, if present, trapped in the countersink of the hole in the backplate. You can see it’s the little gray bit pushing out from that intersection there.

Then they used their impact to tighten the hinge down too tight, loosening it holding capacity by a “taco-ing” the inside face plate of the hinge.

Old timers taught me how it working. Glass would’ve had my head on a pike for the sort of lack of attention to detail that is commonplace these days. SMH