I think of myself as being pretty good about maintaining things around
our home, but I sure missed this one.

One of our 27 year old multipanel single width garage doors equipped
with an equally olde Craftsman chain drive opener started acting "funny"
occasionally for the last few weeks.

It would close OK most of the time but every so often it would get about
3/4 of the way down and reverse back to full open. And once I caught it
stopping about half way up when it was opening.

I tried cranking the up and down "force" potentiometers on the opener to
"full", but that didn't help.

I figured I was probably in for buying a new opener but decided to
remove the opener's cover have a look just in case the problem was
caused by an insect building a nest inside the opener housing and
interfering with a photoelectric motor speed monitoring gizmo as had
happened once maybe fifteen years ago.

Everything looked OK, so I put the cover back on the housing.

Then it hit me. I had dutifully oiled the door's roller wheel bearings
every couple of years but I never thought to oil the dozen panel hinges
on the inside of the door.

I put some oil on each of the hinges and presto, there was much less
noise from the opener when it was running and no sign of it reversing
during closing or stopping while opening.

The "thwock" you may have heard a couple of days ago was me, giving
myself a "dope slap" to the head. I would have felt even more stupid had
I bought a new garage door opener and went through the work of
installing it, probably with it having the same unoiled hinge problem.

Jeff
--
Jeffry Wisnia
(W1BSV + Brass Rat '57 EE)
The speed of light is 1.8*10^12 furlongs per fortnight.