Gearing Up

We had some garage door opening problems recently. It started with Rachelle's door going up too far. There is a stop bolt to prevent the door shuttle from actually colliding with the opener and it had jammed right up against the bolt. I have no idea what caused it, but I had to loosen the chain and play with the up-travel adjustment to get it moving again. After tinkering a little it started working fine. 

Then a week or so later it started acting funny again. It went up fine (to the proper level), but it would only come down a couple of feet and then the door would go back up. This opener is new enough to have one of those laser safety sight things that prevent the door from closing on something in the way, like a car or a small child. It was acting like something was in the way when there wasn't. The lasers have little lights on them that are lit up when they're aimed right and they were both lit. However they were aligned just enough to light up, but when the door actually started moving it jostled the track enough to break the beam. I guess I hit one of the laser things with the snow blower or something and knocked it just a little out of alignment.

Then a couple weeks later it completely stops functioning. When you hit the button the motor ran but the door didn't even try to move. I checked the usual suspects like for broken springs or if the door was frozen to the ground, but even with the door disconnected the chain didn't even budge. It was way too cold outside to screw around with it so I called a local company to fix it.

The opener ended up needing a new gear kit. Apparently it's fairly common for our model opener to grind some gears, especially when it's really cold outside. As you can see from the pictures below, the gear is plastic (genius!) and got ground down to dust. There is a plastic worm gear on the motor that interfaces with this plastic gear and for some reason the gear on the motor never seems to break, it's only this gear. At least that is according to the nice repair guy that fixed it for me.