See this chewed-up plastic gear? THIS is why my electric garage door mechanism stopped working Friday. Behind it is a diagram of the mechanism and where the gear fits in. My home teacher, who fortunately is a contractor and understands mechanical repair-type stuff, came over Friday afternoon to help me figure out why my garage door would only open an inch and then stop. He tightened the chain and we thought it was fixed-- until we heard a weird noise. When he took the mechanism cover off, lots of plastic shavings fell out. Not good.
So, long story short, he dismantled my entire garage door mechanism, took it to his house to figure out what part needed to be replaced (WV dialect note: it would be correct here to say "needed replaced"), researched costs online yesterday, and handed me the information today at church so I can get the part ordered. Mind you, it was something like three degrees outside Friday afternoon while he was doing all this work. And then he invited me to their house for gumbo. I love good home teachers!
Two days without an electric garage door opener and I'm a big whiner. I finally figured out how to open the door manually this afternoon. Funny how you forget that garage doors don't HAVE to be automatic. Or that you even need a garage. Yeah, it's cold outside, but did the pioneers have garage doors? Or cars to put in the garage? Or a house to attach the garage to? Nope. So I won't complain about a few days of inconvenience. I'm not freezing somewhere on the Nebraska plains. Whew!
4 comments:
I think the problem is that that gear is all chewed up. It's not supposed to be like that. Plus it seems to be much larger than the parts in the picture. Maybe you need a smaller gear...
Actually, I just realized that you may have a further problem. (For real this time.) Gears don't usually get chewed up like that unless something is preventing them from turning. Also gears mesh up with other gears or something that makes that gear turn. If this gear is damaged the mechanism that turns this gear may be damaged as well. Regardless, before you just switch everything back on you may want to make certain that things are turning properly and that nothing is seized up. Just my two cents...
Thanks-- we're on it, though. My home teacher did the online research on the part (after dismantling the entire mechanism) and suggested I order the whole drive gear kit, replacing all the parts, rather than just the one gear. So I just did. Hopefully it'll arrive in a week, so maybe I'll be able to open my door electronically by the end of the month. Yes!
I'm with ya on the whole "Why I would have been a lousy pioneer" thing. There's a reason we were born in the twentieth century and God knew it.
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