I used to write door & hardware specs “in-house” for a former employer (architectural firm)
Since we did primarily private projects, “single-sourcing” wasn’t an issue. However, if the Owner has specific hardware requirements or keying system, we accommodated it.
Where I work now, we usually “farm out” the door hardware spec to a manufacturer’s rep.who is an AHC and they do it for free.
We do a lot of public bid work with school didtricts and they all have their “District Standards” for hardware.
While the AHC works for a manufacturer, they don’t sell the products directly to the school disitricts. The hardware is purchased by the Contractor from a distributor.
The AHC’s for the manufacturer write the specs based on the District Standards and not necessarily based on the products they manufacture. They also list alternate manufacturers for products that are not district standard.
This is the way it should be done.
My office used to use a local hardware distributor to write all of our hardware specs. We had a few failures on a job and got into a real sticky situation during construction. We could not get the truth out of the distributor since during construction the distributor was hired by the Contractor. Long story short we realized that we needed an independent consultant.
Now we almost exclusively use an independent hardware consultant. This consultant is not afraid to challenge the contractor, distributor, owner or architect. The consultant is extremely knowledgeable and has years of experience. In addition to writing specs he also reviews submittals and does punchlists.
I can’t see us ever going back to using distributors to write hardware specs.
same thing happened to me. all of a sudden my design team member became a contractor asking for extras that HE forgot when he “designed” the hardware schedule.
The building is a pretty standard “vanilla” building. There were nothing special about it.
I saw a few posts about additional costs to architects for reviewing sub requests.
My answer to that (if possible) include different manufacturers sold by different distributors in the original specs. It will cost me (the owner) thousands of dollars if you dont.