I’m not sure exactly why but over the years I’ve learned a lot about garage doors and openers.
When I was growing up, Mom’s house had a cantilever door that pivoted when you lifted the bottom; your action was supplemented by huge springs on the sides of the door that pulled down while you pushed up. That thing was made of wood and it seemed to get heavier each year. I even told Mom it should be ‘getting lighter’ because I was growing up and getting stronger each year. When I started junior high school she had it replaced with another wooden door “because she was tired of breaking her nails on the heavy beast in the winters.”
I hadn’t thought of that, but the wood was obviously soaking up water during rainstorms and was that much heavier and harder to lift. The more it aged the more cracks it developed and the more those cracks filled with water during storms the heavier that thing got. The new door didn’t do much better, but aluminum or steel doors were more expensive at the time. A couple years after I graduated, though, the door slipped while someone was lifting it and Mom got a nasty bump on the head. A month later she had it replaced with an aluminum door.
The neighbor thought our new aluminum door looked nice and got one for himself. Then he had me help him build a frame to hold a garage-door opener and, naturally, I suggested to Mom that she get one. By then she wasn’t driving much so it wasn’t important to her.
Then there was this weird incident, during early testing of the AWACS planes, in which the planes flying out of NAS Miramar were somehow causing all the garage doors below the testing flight path# to open, but not close. Channel 10 News mentioned it as something funny at the end of a broadcast, but a lot of people were pretty pissed off and the Navy issued an apology with a promise to change their frequency. Mom said, “See! That’s why I don’t want a garage-door-opener.”
After losing our condo to the 2008-ish real estate bubble my wife and I moved to a rental house that happened to have a garage door and an opener. At some point I noticed the opener wasn’t hanging perfectly vertical where it was mounted and I notified the landlord, who told me not to worry about or mess with it. Three months later, the motor stopped lifting the door. I told the landlord, who realized it was her responsibility to replace it, and she coordinated the installation of a new one by Sears. When I was talking with the installer, he mentioned…
- Aluminum garage doors are usually cheaper, stronger, and lighter than wooden doors now.
- Most will be multi-sectioned in horizontal strips, with a torsion spring and cables assisting at the top.
- Sears, Genie, Liftmaster, (and maybe) Chamberlain are different brand names slapped on the same parts. There will be different levels of quality and value depending on what combinations of cheap and expensive parts each brand wants thrown together. To my surprise, the old Genie remote controls for the dead opener worked perfectly to signal the Sears/Liftmaster unit that replaced it, so we had four and kept one in each car, one on my motorcycle, and one in the wife’s purse. We stopped using the front door to go anywhere.
When we moved to a different rental place, it had a garage-door-opener as well – and we would have had six working remote controls except that the wife figured we should leave the first landlord a pair of remotes for the replacement unit that Sears had installed.
We moved yet again to buy our own place and the original remotes for the first landlord’s dead opener still worked to signal yet another opener. However, the wheels on the aluminum door squeaked REALLY LOUD and the torsion spring was super grindy-sounding when the door was being raised or lowered. I had a garage-door specialist come out and he noted that the torsion springs at the top were pretty worn and rusty and the tracks on the sides were pretty filthy and all that tends to give the motor more and more fight as the coiled spring is helping less and less and the tracks are providing more and more friction. He cleaned things up and lubricated them, but I passed on his offer of a replacement opener.
Then I searched online for garage door parts and found a place that could sell me replacement torsion springs cheap. I splurged (for a cheapskate) and got a kit with the springs, roller drums, and lift cables, then spent a weekend doing the work for myself. After all, it’s not rocket science!
No, but it is physics.
Balancing a baseball bat on the tip of your finger is pretty simple and inconsequential. Balancing six 40-pound twelve-foot-wide aluminum panels so you can easily lift and lower them with the tip of your finger turns out to be not-so-inconsequential. I replaced the torsion springs by myself (and doing that properly is the most critical and most hazardous part of the job – it is NOT something to do when there’s nobody else at home) and replaced the rollers and cables alone as well. And I’m quite proud to say that everything worked smoothly and the motor had an easy time with the door right away.
It wasn’t until the sixth or eight time that something odd shifted and the door just stopped going up. The light on the opener was on, so it was obvious there wasn’t a power outage. I went in through the front door, through the kitchen and into the garage and found no obstructions or other weirdness going on. The thing just didn’t want to move. So I disconnected the lifter, shoved the door open, and parked the car.
Without the motor assist and even with the cables and torsion springs helping, lifting 240 pounds of wide aluminum panel (admittedly, the balance was supported by the wheels and tracks ) is still something of a chore. I could do it a couple times a day (and even then it would take me about ten minutes to get the door open enough to get a good grip on it to start) but it was definitely not a job to do by straightening the lumbar. Having spent decades in martial arts and bicycling, my quadriceps and glutes are pretty strong, so my technique was to set my back against the door, search for the bottom edge of the lowest panel, hook my fingers under, and use all butt-and-legs to get the door to start rising. Then it was just a matter of spring-tension and momentum – and praying I had used enough leg-surge so the door wouldn’t fall back down on me. After a week of manual operation, my wife just suggested leaving the car in the driveway.
I called the repair guy back and he came out to inspect everything. He complimented me on the work I had done and found the problem: A hair-line crack on the edge of a middle panel (right in the middle of its width, actually) that was letting the panel flex just as it was rounding the corner and going from vertical to horizontal. That flexing action was pulling the other panels out of alignment, causing a surge of motion that the opener was sensing (I never realized they were so sophisticated!) and the unit was designed to immediately halt operations when something like that occurred. [Better to avoid wrecking a car or squishing a cat, I suppose.]
So…
I could replace the one panel, which was stamped out with a design he hadn’t seen since the 1980s, but he was sure he’d never find anything close in his supplier catalogs. OR I could replace the whole set of panels with a new door with a modern style of my choice from his company catalog. Oh…but since it was past January, he had to comply with a law that was passed just the previous fall. It required any new garage doors to be installed with a modern opener – one with a built-in battery back-up system that will move the door a few times even during a power-outage so that residents won’t be trapped in their garage or unable to evacuate during an emergency or natural disaster.$
I sat on that until an annual bonus came in then replaced the whole bundle – motor, tracks, cable, panels, torsion-spring and torsion-bar. Unfortunately, the new unit doesn’t accept signals from the old remote controls. But I can live with that; they’re cheap and I got an after-market unit for the motorcycle.
—G!
#I guess the take-off flight path out was not the same as the landing flight path.
$Surely that was pushed through by the garage-door-opener lobbyists. It’s not like California has any kind of natural emergency that would cause a power outage – yes I’m being completely facetious.