Donald Bell
Life safety · fire-rated doors — and the voice behind Fire Door Dojo.
Donald Bell works in life safety, and fire-rated doors are his passion and his hobby: repairing them, testing them and keeping them working the way they were listed to.
He is the person the team calls when a label doesn’t make sense or a pair of doors won’t latch, and he keeps everyone sharp with short notes — a label spotted on a trip, a ten-minute repair, an article worth a read. He’ll be the first to admit when something confuses him too, and then go to the code book.
What he focuses on
Repair
Getting beat-up doors closing and latching again — often for a fraction of the replacement cost.
Testing
The annual NFPA 80 inspection: close, latch, gaps, labels, hardware.
Maintenance
Catching the small problems before they turn into a write-up.
Teaching
Short notes to the team, so everyone gets the refresher.
His lessons on LifeSafetyWiki
How Donald contributes here
Donald brings the field know-how and the lessons; LifeSafetyWiki adds the formatting and checks every code point against the standard — NFPA 80 for doors, NFPA 101 for the occupancy rules — before it goes up.