Padel Court Steel Structure & Fittings: Posts, Beams, Base Plates and SUS304 Hardware

A padel court is often described as a flat-pack structure, which makes it sound simple. In practice the frame is a bolted steel assembly of roughly a dozen distinct part types, and it is the line item with the largest weight and the largest freight consequence in the whole kit. If you are buying a court, an OEM container of frames, or a set of spare parts for an existing facility, the table below is the parts list to compare against any quotation.

Two numbers frame this list. First, the steel is the heaviest line in the kit: roughly 3.5–4.5 tonnes of Q235B steel per standard court, which is what your freight forwarder, your crane and your customs declaration are actually dealing with. Second, the steel is not the whole package: add glass, turf, sand and mesh and one court lands around 13 tonnes of delivered material before the foundation and lighting, which is the figure a structural engineer needs when the court goes on a roof deck or a suspended slab.

Our frames are made from Q235B structural steel to the Chinese national standard GB/T 700-2006, a low-carbon steel with a tensile strength of 370–500 MPa that welds cleanly and is produced in high volume for construction and machinery. It is the grade we put a mill certificate against, line by line, in your order documents. What usually causes trouble is not the grade on the drawing, but the wall thickness that arrives: a 2 mm or 2.5 mm profile will fit the same glass and the same bolts, and it will flex visibly in wind.

If you specify a heavier profile than you need, you pay for it twice — once in steel and once in freight, because the structure is the densest part of the container. If you specify a lighter one, you pay later in flex, glass alignment and repainting. The practical answer is to fix the profile list against your wind and snow case, and then insist that the delivered bundles are cut from exactly that list. We publish the profile per model so the comparison can be made line by line, and stock profiles are held for volume orders.

An outdoor padel court is a permanently wet environment for part of the year, and on a coastal site it is also a salt environment. Both attack the same three places: welds, cut edges and bolt holes, where the protective layer is thinnest. Our standard system is two layers. First, the steel is hot-dip galvanised: the components are immersed in molten zinc at around 450 °C, and the zinc metallurgically bonds to the steel surface to form a zinc-iron alloy layer that is sacrificial — it corrodes before the steel does. Second, after galvanising, the components receive an electrostatically applied polyester powder coat, baked to cure, in two coats. The result is a total coating of 150–300 µm, against an industry average of 60–100 µm.

Three details decide whether the galvanising you paid for is the galvanising you receive. Ask for the zinc thickness measurement, not a certificate of appearance — a galvanising report in grams per square metre or microns tells you the layer is actually there. Confirm that galvanising happens after welding and drilling, not before, because every hole and every weld drawn after coating leaves bare steel. And keep a tin of touch-up paint on site for the scratches that installation inevitably makes, since a scratch in the powder coat cannot repair itself and the zinc underneath only protects until it is consumed.

A padel court frame is a bolted structure: hundreds of bolts, nuts and washers hold the posts, beams, gussets, base plates, mesh frames and hinges together, and they are exposed to weather for the life of the court. We use SUS304 stainless steel for the full set. SUS304 is 18% chromium and 8% nickel, effectively non-magnetic in the annealed condition, and it holds up in atmospheric exposure, fresh water and most chemical exposure without the rust spotting that appears on lower grades.

The fitting package we quote with the frame covers:

• SUS304 bolts, nuts and washers — the full set for the frame, with nylon lock nuts on the structural connections so vibration and wind do not walk a joint loose.
• Hot-dip galvanised base plates and gussets — protected on the underside where they sit on the slab, because that is where water collects.
• Glass restraint profiles, gaskets and wedges — the connection that holds the tempered panels and lets the glass float slightly instead of being pinched.
• Door hardware — stainless hinges plus a floor spring or gas damper, so a door left open in wind does not slam and take the frame load with it.
• Mesh-to-post fixings — set in a pattern that keeps the mesh band flush with the glass line.
• Anchor bolts and chemical anchors — cast into the ring beam for standard sites, chemical anchors added on high-wind, hurricane and typhoon sites.

One substitution costs more than any other: zinc-plated mild-steel fasteners in place of stainless. They look identical in a photograph and in a box of mixed parts, they are the first thing to corrode on an outdoor court, and once a fixing fails the panel above it loosens with it. Two minutes with a magnet at the factory is enough — if the fastener is strongly magnetic, it is not SUS304.

Loads reach the ground through a chain: the glass and mesh take the pressure, the posts take the bending, the base plates take the moment, and the anchor bolts and ring beam take the uplift and the shear. Every link in that chain has to be sized for your site, and the failure mode in real life is rarely a broken post — it is a connection that works loose or a base plate that lifts.

We design our standard frame for a characteristic wind speed of around 120 km/h sustained and then apply the site-specific gust factor, following the wind provisions of ASCE 7 or EN 1991-1-4 together with the steel design rules of EN 1993-1-1. The number that matters to a buyer is not “how much wind can the court take” in the abstract but “what wind speed, exposure and terrain does this frame’s calculation assume, and is that above my site’s requirement”. That calculation, issued as a document, is part of the engineering file for the project. If you are building on a coast, in a typhoon region or above a certain height, say so at enquiry stage: the answer changes the base plates, the anchor detail, the glass restraint and sometimes the profile itself. For a US site the same load documents are reviewed against IBC and ASCE 7 rather than EN, and what a US plan reviewer asks for alongside them is set out in our US padel court building-code guide.

Glass panels are 12 mm tempered sheets that cannot be adjusted with a hammer, and doors have a fixed clearance in their frames. That means a steel frame will only line up if the concrete beneath it is level and the anchor bolts are where the drawing says they are. Anchor bolts must be set in concrete while it is wet; they cannot be drilled and epoxied after curing without compromising accuracy, so the positions are held with a plywood or steel template during the pour and verified before the concrete sets.

The practical consequence for a buyer is that the frame drawings and the foundation drawings have to be issued as one package, by the same supplier, with the same bolt coordinates on both. We issue the foundation drawing with the anchor-bolt layout for every order, and we will check your site engineer's version against ours before the pour. It is a ten-minute comparison that prevents the most expensive kind of rework, because once concrete has cured around a mis-placed bolt, the options are cutting the bolt out or re-drilling the base plate.

The frame also changes for indoor and roofed courts. An indoor court stands on the hall slab rather than a ring beam, so the base plate detail and the anchor method change even though the profiles stay the same. A court that will be covered later should be ordered with the roof base plates and the heavier corner posts from the start: retrofitting foundation and frame for a canopy after the court is playing is one of the most expensive retrofits in the sport, because it means interrupting play to work inside an operating court. See our court types comparison and the roof and canopy systems page for how that decision interacts with the cover you choose.

Steel profiles are bundled and strapped by assembly zone, with each bundle labelled to the shop drawing, and glass panels travel separately in wooden crates with foam separators because they are the part of the shipment that cannot be replaced locally. One complete court kit fits in a single 40 ft container; a double court takes two, and optional items such as lighting, doors, branding panels and spare parts share the same container space. We photograph the loading and send the container plan with the shipping documents, so the receiving site knows which bundle to open first.

On site, the assembly sequence is deliberately repetitive:

1. Check the delivery against the packing list — every bolt, bracket and panel labelled and grouped by assembly zone. Report shortages before assembly starts, not during it.
2. Stand the corner posts on the anchor bolts and hand-tighten only. Do not torque anything until the whole frame is assembled.
3. Bolt the crossbeams and upper ring between the posts at the drawing heights, using SUS304 bolts with nylon lock nuts.
4. Square the mesh frames before final tightening, and check the frame diagonals against the drawing.
5. Torque from the corners inward, re-checking plumb on each post and the diagonal of each bay as you go.
6. Set the glass and doors last, after the frame is stable and torqued; a 2 × 3 m tempered panel weighs around 180 kg, so plan the lifting crew or crane and never pry a panel into place.

No field welding is required or wanted. A factory built the frame on jigs, drilled it against a template and galvanised it afterwards; welding on site destroys the coating at exactly the joint that carries the most load. If a hole does not line up, the answer is to find the packing error or call us, not to open it up with a torch. Full steps, torque guidance and the site checklist are in our installation and construction guide, and the quantities behind the packing list are in the bill of materials.

Every order ships with the drawing set and the material evidence for the actual production run, not for a sample:

• Approved shop drawings — post and beam profiles, heights, hole patterns, base plate positions and the door frame.
• Foundation drawing with the anchor-bolt layout — the coordinates your contractor sets out from the concrete.
• Steel mill certificate for Q235B to GB/T 700-2006, matched to the heat numbers of the production run.
• Galvanising thickness report and the coating specification, so the zinc layer can be verified rather than assumed.
• Quality and inspection record — welding and dimensional checks in process, and a pre-shipment check of the packed bundles.
• Container loading photographs and packing list — useful evidence if anything is short-landed.
• Installation guide and remote support — a site-specific sequence plus video support during assembly.

The steel structure and load-bearing frame carry our 5-year structural warranty against manufacturing defects and corrosion; glass, mesh, turf, lighting and fittings carry their own component warranties, and the terms are issued in writing with the quotation rather than summarised at the end of a sales call. You can read the full terms on our warranty page, and the document set that accompanies a court order is described in the certification and compliance guide.

1. Court model and layout — classic, panoramic or super panoramic, and whether the courts are single or in a block.
2. Number of courts — one court is a standard order; volume orders are scheduled on our 8 production lines.
3. Indoor, outdoor or roofed — this decides the base plate detail, the anchor method and whether roof base plates should be included now.
4. Site wind speed and snow load, or simply the site location, so we can apply the right design case.
5. Colour in RAL — the powder coat colour, and whether you need branded or stencilled components.
6. Destination port and delivery scope — FOB, CIF or DDP, so the quotation is comparable with the offers you already hold.
7. Spare parts — spare fixings, gaskets, hinges and at least one spare glass panel per site: the items that decide whether a damaged court is out of play for a day or a month.

Orders are quoted per court and can be supplied as a complete court, as a structure-only frame for an existing glazing package, or as spare components for a facility already in operation. Minimum order is one court on standard models; production typically runs three to seven weeks depending on model and quantity, and the frame ships in the same container as the rest of the kit so the site receives one delivery, one packing list and one warranty. If you buy the structure on its own, tell us which glass thickness and panel sizes you are working with — the glazing profiles and hole patterns are matched at order stage rather than adapted on site.