Opening AND Closing

My garage door opener decided to quit in January.

It's been a minor irritation opening and closing it manually.

But I recently discovered it would OPEN the door, but wouldn't close it because I unthinkingly hit the button when I got in the car.

That made it slightly less irritating to use the garage door.  Our security for The Boy's elopements is the main reason it's irritating.

The other day, not thinking like before, it closed.

I had noticed how smoothly it'd been moving up of late, so I got to thinking...

That got me to look up the instructions.

The instructions that I swear we followed.

We had not.

We'd reused the bracket that some previous owner had put on the door and it was mid-span of the top panel instead of in line with the top rollers.

The bar that connected the shuttle to the bracket was upside down.

Because of these two geometric mistakes, the connector bar was too long and at too shallow of an angle to the door while closed.

All of that all adds up to binding and that overtorqued the motor.

So I got on the ladder, moved the bracket, shortened the connector bar, hung it correctly and moved the closed stop switch.

It's worked three times in a row, and as we all know that means it's reliable for all time.

I don't entirely trust it, but it puts off replacing it a few more months and even if it fails again we're no worse than we were.