Pop wrote:
"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!

Agreed, but did you take into account that the free spring end only
moves half as far as the door travels, so the spring has to pull twice
as hard as the amount of door weight it is supporting?

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.

Wouldn't it be 9" gain at the 5' point?

The OP said it was to gain clearance for a car lift, and most cars are
taller near their centers than they are at the back, so I'd guess he'd
gain at least a foot of extra lift clearance in a typical length garage.

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.

Might be, but then he'd have to extend the opener to door linkage too.
(More work)

And, in the "up" position quite a bit of the bottom end of the door
wouldn't be on the horizontal portion of the track anyway, which gets us
back to the problem of gravity making it drop if all the wrong things
let go.

I say that because in all probability his existing opener won't have
enough travel to pull that door "all the way up" onto the horizontal
portion of the track. If it's a chain type he could extend the rail and
add more chain (more work) IF the up/down limit switch system could
accomodate 18" of extra opener travel.

If it was a screw type opener hed be screwed. :-)

I think he's on the right "track" with the tilted rails. He'd have to
have the opener to door link fail at the same time as at least one of
the springs to have the door come crashing down, and that's not likely
to happen save for when the door is in motion.

I don't make it a practice to stand in the door opening while the door
is moving, would you?

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.

Amen to that, Pops. I got smart real quick and added safety cables to
both our single width garage doors when one spring let go and punched
quite a big hole through the drywall over the garage door opening. I
wasn't hit, but I was in the garage when it happened and I nearly
cracked my head on the ceiling jumping when that "big bang" occurred.

I didn't know what strength springs to go out and buy so I measured the
downforce weight of the hollow core multipanel door with our bathroom
scale. The scale only went up to 250 lbs, so I had to rig a 2:1 lever
system from a short length of 2 by 4 and a brick so that the scale read
half the door weight, which was 300 lbs.

Jeff

--
Jeffry Wisnia

(W1BSV + Brass Rat '57 EE)

"Truth exists; only falsehood has to be invented."