We’ve got a electric garage door opener. Always have had one. So, I would never know how much grunting I would have to do to open the garage door until the goddamn thing broke.
Well, the goddamn thing broke.
The first time it broke, it looked pretty simple to fix. The kind of garage door opener that we have uses a bicycle chain to pull the door up. A cog wheel just a little smaller than the one on the hub of the back wheel of your bike sticks out the top of the motor. The chain jumped off the cog, for no reason that I could see, but fixing it should’ve been just a matter of wrapping the chain around the cog.
Easier said than done, it turned out. First, because it’s been cold as Hell Frozen Over, in case you haven’t heard. Second, because the chain had to be wrapped tightly around the cog in order for the whole kit and caboodle to work. It was wrapped so tight that fixing it was not a matter of simply reaching up and hooking the chain around the cog. There wasn’t enough slack in the chain for that, and my fingers went numb before I could figure out how to loosen it.
Today was a little warmer than usual, so I bundled up and went out to the garage again to see if I could work it out. There’s a ten-foot-long piece of angle iron that runs from the motor to a bracket on the wall above the door; it’s a track for a metal shuttle about the size of a pack of cigarettes. The shuttle pulls on a steel arm that’s attached to the door. The track was high above my head, even when I was standing on a ladder, and too close to the ceiling for me to see anything going on above it, but I found a little pin that released it from the bracket above the door, and it swung down far enough for me to see what was going on.
The chain was bolted solidly to one end of the shuttle, but attached to the other end with a long screw. If I unscrewed it, the chain went slack enough for me to wrap it around the cog. Then, all I had to do was tighten up the screw again, lift the track back up to the bracket and put the pin back in. Voila! Fixed! Problem solved! I am a goddamn genius!
When I hit the button to pull the garage door up, though, there was a loud *SNAP!*, the chain went slack, and something went jingle-jingle-jingle across the cement floor of the garage. Well, of course it did. That fix was way too easy.
I didn’t have to pull the pin on the track this time to see what had gone wrong: I got a quick look at the top of the motor and saw that the chain had gone slack because the cog was gone. The goddamn cog was gone! It had snapped right off the end of the drive shaft! I didn’t even have to look far to find it on the floor of the garage. That’s what had gone jingle-jingle right after the chain went slack for the second time.
So I unbolted the whole mess from the ceiling, carried the motor to the basement work shop, and unscrewed the cover. The drive mechanism looked very simple, so simple that it appeared to be utterly disposable. I couldn’t imagine that anybody anywhere bothered with the expense of offering replacements parts for it. Imagine my surprise when a quick Google search came up with an on-line supplier for exactly the part I was looking for. What happened to me is either a common breakdown for a large enough number of people who own this particular make of garage door opener, or somebody out there likes me. I hope it’s Option B.
I ordered a new drive shaft and cog. It was only forty bucks, a whole lot less than buying a new opener. If it gets here this week, and the weather warms up by next weekend, then very soon I might be able to open the door without grunting.
This Is Drivel 