"dean" wrote in message
ups.com...
: Yes, I agree with all that you said. I was only thinking that
for some
: reason it would be unsafe to have the door on a slope, if I
left it
: open and, I dunno, the springs broke or something, it might
just roll
: down and hurt someone.
:
: I'll take a look at the rails tonight, to see if they can be
modified.
:
: Thanks,
:
: Dean
:
Actually I think that might be fairly unlikely but not impossible
by any means. If one spring breaks, usually the remaining
tension from the other spring would make the door go crooked as
it tried to drop, which sort of wedges the door between the
tracks.
If it did drop though, you're right, it would come down with
quite a bang since half the spring tension would be missing.

The poster who mentioned the safety wires had good advice too. I
had a spring end snap off once and it brought down ten feet of
metal shelving along with it, plus the spring put a dent half an
inch deep into the wooden header over the garage door.
Fortunately I was standing on the other side of the garage at the
time. The spring itself broke right where it hooked into the
eyebolt. Actually the spring itself wore thin from years of use.
I grease the spring points now and you can safely assume I now
have safety wires inside the springs. It was simple to do; just
a few feet of aircraft wire the right length and fastened right.
A guy at Overhead Door showed me how to set it up. The one here
is a great place; very helpful to the diy'er.

AFter replacing the springs, just for grins, I attached one to
the wall and a piece of pipe thru the other end and there was no
way I could stretch that spring out as long as my garage door did
with two of them. Wooden garage doors are VERY heavy!

BTW, I still think the whole door should be level on top, but in
looking at my own setup today (9' wide x 8' high), I'll bet
you -could- turn the 90 degrees into something smaller by trial
and error by just grinding away metal where they fasten together,
so it might not be such a huge job.

If you don't know how to calculate it, come on back with
the -horizontal- length of the track from where it turns into
horizontal to the farthest away point where the eighteen inch
rise has to happen, and I'll figure it out for you unless you
already know how to do that.

Assuming a ten foot long track, which many are, moving one end of
it up 18" would result in a slope of about 8.5 degrees, not a
whole lot of metal to grind off. By grinding the old holes would
probably still be usable, but ... you'd want to provide some
extra external bracing to hold the angles in place; an easy
enough task, esp if you have rivet gun.

BUT ... I'm not sure I see how that would give you much
improvement on getting more space underneath the door when it's
in the up position. At the 5' point you'd only gain 4.5", 2
1/4" at the quarter point, and so on.

So perhaps that's another arguement for raising the whole
track up. I think it'd be a lot easier to just add a short piece
of vertical track to lift the whole thing up than it would be to
mess with changing the angle and ending up with an incline.

And please, don't even consider working on this with the door up.
Disconnect it and leave the door down to work on it. In case you
should have to take the door off, you START with the top section
first, and when you put it back, START with the bottom section
first. Don't try to take it out in one piece unless it's
ultralight and you're near superman.

HTH

PopS