breakaway door research

One of my conundrums for my upcoming projects is breakaway doors and walls. They get busted open all over the place!

So here's some information I'm scrounging from the internet ethos for us. Here's some of the advice I've found so far about doors:

"The one that gets knocked off its hinges can be really easy if it swings upstage--just use loose pin hinges and have someone pull the pins just before the big moment. If it needs toswing downstage, you could use lift-off hinges so the actor just lifts the door slightly to pull it off its hinges. Likely need to modify the hinges so the pins are shorter and leave a bit of extra clearance inside the top of the door frame.

For the other door--what is it supposed to look like? a residential hollow core door? A solid raised-panel door? Probably the easiest and most convincing method would be to build it as a hollow-core door with balsa facing and just reface or rebuild it for each show. You could also build it as a solid door and pre-break parts and insert thin dowels across the breaks to hold the pieces together--that way when the door gets hit the dowels snap and the pieces fall apart. Or you could do a hybrid of the two methods, for instance build a raised panel door where the frame is pre-broken and doweled and build one of the panels from balsa so it can be destroyed each show and a new panel slotted in."

And for breakaway walls, I've found these videos to be pretty helpful:

Also my favorite guys at BFX made a video:

Let's start breaking stuff!!