Jeff Wisnia wrote:
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

A few months ago I was lubing up my garage door as part of a Saturday
morning general maintenance session. For years I had been listening to a
rattle as the door went up and down which I knew was coming from the chain.
I thought it was just the chain bouncing against the GDO rail as it moved.
This time, while I was up on the ladder lubing the rail, I noticed that the
chain was actually rubbing on one of the nuts from the bolts that hold the
3 sections of rail together. The rattle was the tick-tick-tick as each link
went over the nut.

I grabbed a piece of 1 x 2 PVC trim from the scrape box, rounded off one
end of it with my bench top sander, and then cut it so that it was just a
bit "taller" than the nut. I drilled a hole in the flat end of the piece so
that it fit snugly over the nut that the chain was rubbing on. The chain
now glides over the rounded end of the PVC as it moves and the chain's
tension holds it firmly against the rail. The whole system just sounds so
much smoother and quieter now.

The other noise reduction step I took many, many years ago was to cut 2
short pieces of rubber conveyor belt material to use as hangers for the
GDO. I attached an L bracket to the joists and to the top of the GDO, and
used the conveyor belt material to isolate the GDO from the structure. It
cut the noise into the room above the garage at least in half. The boys
could actually sleep through the up and down operation of the door after
that.