Heat resistant strip curtains and strip doors built to your opening, in three materials, priced online instead of by quote. Part of our full strip curtains range.

We manufacture these in our own shop in South Holland, Illinois, and we publish the real continuous temperature rating of every layer — not the rating of the base fabric with the coating's limit left out. If you've been comparing curtains advertised at 1,000°F, 2,000°F, or 3,500°F, the temperature section below is worth two minutes.

No minimum size. We regularly build 3' × 4' batch oven doors and conveyor slots that most suppliers won't configure online. $350 minimum order.

Choose Your Material

All three run in the same temperature class — 482°F to 500°F continuous on a 1,000°F E-glass base. They are not a temperature ladder. Pick by the problem you're solving, not by how hot your oven runs.

One exception where temperature does decide: above 480°F, choose the Silicone Coated build over Reflective. The aluminized layer tops out at 482°F and it's the face pointed at your heat source.

Silicone Coated Fiberglass Strip Curtains — 500°F

Our standard build. 32 oz Red Spark™ silicone coated fiberglass, single layer, sewn with stainless steel thread.

The heavy silicone coating gives abrasion, puncture and tear resistance, repels water and oil, and produces low smoke. It stays flexible enough to push open by hand and recover, and the red face gives high visibility at a doorway people walk through.

Right for conveyor ovens, curing ovens, heat treat cure-down, paint bake, powder cure, general shop heat containment, and foundry aisle separation.

• Material: 32 oz/sq yd silicone coated fiberglass, .035" thick
• Continuous service rating: 500°F
• Limiting layer: silicone coating
• Base fabric: 1,000°F E-glass (see note below)

Reflective Aluminized Strip Curtains — 482°F

Two layers: an aluminized fiberglass face that reflects radiant heat back toward your heat source, bonded to a 32 oz Red Spark™ silicone coated fiberglass back that takes the abrasion from parts and personnel passing through.

The reflective layer is aluminum foil laminated to fiberglass with a high-temperature adhesive — not a metallized polymer film. There's no film to haze, outgas, or delaminate, which matters when the reflective face is the one pointed at your heat.

Right for holding BTUs in: oven mouths on continuous lines, reducing preheat time, holding process temperature, and dropping ambient temperature at the operator station.

• Face: 17 oz/sq yd aluminized fiberglass, aluminum foil laminate
• Back: 32 oz/sq yd Red Spark™ silicone coated fiberglass
• Continuous service rating: 482°F, short term 518°F
• Limiting layer: aluminized laminate
• Reflective face hangs toward the heat source

PTFE Coated (Teflon®) Non-Stick Strip Curtains — 500°F

Built for coating lines, where surface contamination is the failure you're trying to prevent.

Silicone migrates and outgasses. In a paint or powder bake oven that shows up as fisheyes and craters in the finish, and it can be difficult to trace back to a curtain hanging in the doorway. PTFE doesn't migrate.

It also releases. Overspray, resin, sugars and adhesive don't build up, and parts brushing past slide instead of catching. When it does need cleaning, it wipes down.

This isn't a hotter curtain — it's a different one. Choose it when contamination, buildup or cleanability is the problem, not temperature.

• Material: two layers of 16.7 oz/sq yd PTFE coated fiberglass, Alpha Maritex® FCF-1650 — roughly 33 oz finished
• Coated face outward on both sides; fluorocarbon impregnated through the weave
• Continuous service rating: 500°F, intermittent 600°F
• Limiting layer: PTFE coating
• Tensile: 423 lbs/in warp, 308 lbs/in fill (ASTM D-5034)
• Trapezoidal tear: 25 lbs warp and fill (ASTM D-5587)
• Flame: UL 94 V-0; ASTM D-6413 char length 1" max, 1 sec afterglow, 1 sec flame out
• UV: ASTM G-154, 1,000 hours, no change in tensile

Not rated for food contact. This material carries no FDA compliance. If you need FDA-compliant construction for a bakery or food processing oven, contact us — we build those in a food-grade material.

Furnace and Foundry Curtains Above 1,000°F

Strip curtains for forge, foundry, kiln and molten metal openings are built in vermiculite coated silica rated to 1,800°F continuous. Different material, different hardware, different construction — those are quoted rather than configured. We manufacture the High Temperature Strip Curtains under our Steel Guard Safety brand. Call - to Request a quote

Applications

Most people arrive here knowing their process rather than their material. This is a starting point — the decision chart above is the better guide, since the same industry can want a different build depending on what's actually going wrong.

Not sure which applies? Tell us the opening size, what runs through it, and your operating temperature, and we'll spec it.

Working below 150°F instead? Our PVC strip curtains cover cooler openings, and anti-static strip curtains handle ESD-sensitive areas. The full strip curtains collection has freezer, cleanroom and livestock configurations.

How Tight a Seal Do You Need?

Almost every strip curtain overlap guide online is written for 0.08" PVC. Those numbers don't transfer to coated fabric. At 50% overlap someone is pushing through two layers of heavy coated fiberglass; PVC at 50% is two layers of something that flexes like a shower curtain.

Our grommets are punched on 4" centers to match the mounting hardware, so strip width and overlap work together rather than as separate choices. Three builds:

Maximum seal — 8" strips, 50% overlap. Every point across the opening is covered by two layers. The best heat containment we build, and the right call when the goal is energy savings or dropping ambient temperature at the operator station. Takes the most effort to push through.

Moderate seal — 6" strips, 33% overlap. Same strip count and same hardware as Maximum, using narrower strips. Two inches of every four are doubled. Noticeably easier to walk through, still a real barrier. Right for pedestrian and cart traffic where people pass frequently.

Minimum — 8" strips, butt joint. Strips hang edge to edge with no overlap. Lowest resistance, best visibility, least material. Sealing is worse, but often good enough when the goal is knocking down radiant escape and draft rather than achieving a freezer-grade seal. Right for continuous conveyor passthrough where drag marks the finish, and where operators need line of sight into the process.

What we don't offer: overlaps above 50%. Those are cold-storage and exterior-door conventions borrowed from PVC. On heavy coated fiberglass they produce a curtain your people will walk around instead of through.

Need 4" strips? We build them, but on a 4" grid they can only butt-joint and they're priced per job. Call us.

What Moves Through the Opening?

Wider strips mean fewer seams. Narrower strips push open easier and seal better around irregular loads. If a forklift carries light product, oversized strips can drag it off the forks. Tell us what moves through and we'll steer you.

High Temp Strip Curtain Temperature Ratings — Read This Before You Compare Quotes

Almost every temperature rating in this industry describes the base fabric, not the finished curtain.

A coated fabric is a substrate plus a coating, and they fail at very different temperatures. E-glass fiberglass is good to about 1,000°F. But the silicone coating on it stops at 500°F. PTFE stops at 500°F and decomposes around 660°F. The aluminized layer in a reflective curtain stops lower still.

Quote the base fabric and you can advertise 1,000°F on a curtain whose coating fails at half that. Quote a silica base and you can advertise 1,800°F. Quote nothing in particular and you can advertise 3,500°F, which is above the melting point of every material in this category.

What we do instead: publish the continuous rating of the limiting layer in each build, name which layer it is, and hand you the manufacturer's data sheet on request.

If a curtain you're comparing is advertised well above 1,000°F, ask the seller one question: what is the standalone maximum operating temperature of the coating, separate from the base fabric? A supplier who can answer that is worth buying from.

What the Base Fabric Limit Actually Means

All three builds use a 1,000°F E-glass base fabric. That is not a service rating. It's the temperature at which the woven glass substrate itself gives out. The coating fails long before that. We publish it because it tells you the failure mode, not because you can run the curtain there.

Above the continuous rating, the coating degrades first. It hardens, discolors, and eventually breaks down, exposing bare glass that starts to shed fiber. The curtain doesn't tear or drop — it stops being abrasion resistant, stops being reflective if it's the aluminized build, and starts putting fiber into the air.

So a short excursion above the rating won't put the curtain on your floor. Repeated excursions will shorten its life sharply, and you'll see it as discoloration and stiffening well before it fails outright.

When you see a strip curtain advertised at 1,000°F, 2,000°F, or 3,500°F, this is usually the number being quoted.

Which Way Does the Reflective Side Face?

Toward the heat source — with one caveat that matters more than the physics.

The physics says a reflective face on the hot side stops radiant energy before it enters the assembly, so the substrate, stitching and outer layer all run cooler and last longer. That's correct as far as it goes.

But the reflective layer has its own temperature limit, and on many aluminized fabrics that limit is lower than the fabric behind it. You cannot put a 450°F reflective layer into a 600°F oven face no matter what the radiation equation says. Material limits beat thermal optimization.

So the real rule: reflective toward the heat, as long as the reflective layer itself is rated for the temperature it will see. Ours is a foil laminate rated to 482°F. Tell us your operating temperature and we'll confirm the right build and orientation.

Two more things a reflector needs to earn its keep: a clean surface — tar, soot and overspray will take a highly reflective face to a dull black one within days — and, in curtain-wall applications, an air gap. A reflective layer laminated flat with no standoff contributes very little.

Build Details

• Stainless steel thread throughout. Fiberglass and PTFE threads cap at 500–600°F. Ours doesn't.
• Grommets on 4" centers to match standard strip door mounting hardware.
• Individual strips are replaceable. Replace what wears, not the whole curtain.
• Cut with the warp running vertically so the strong direction carries the hanging weight.
• Made in South Holland, Illinois in our own 17,000 sq ft facility. Family-run for 100 years.
• $350 minimum order. Smaller openings price at the minimum.