My garage door has been giving me problems lately… it doesn’t go down smoothly, and so it starts to shimmy, and half of the time it jams and the garage door opener reverses itself.
I finally go around to looking at it today. I unhooked the traveler arm thingy from the garage door opener, and rode it up and down a couple of times to see if I could identify where it was snagging. Without the noise of the garage door opener, I was able to hear some odd clicking noises and quickly identified it as a bad pulley. I looked at the pulley, and sure enough it was totally shot. I then looked at the other 3 pulleys, and all of them were either shot, or mostly shot. I went to Home Depot and got 4 new pulleys. It took me about 20 minutes to replace all 4. When I got the old pulleys off, I verified that they were completely shot by looking at the bolts. The center part of the pulley is supposed to be stationary, but some of the bolts holding the pulleys on had the threads worn off completely – indicating that the entire pully was rotating, not just the outside portion.
It really felt great hitting the garage door button and watching the garage door smoothly lower itself.
It was also great knowing that I didn’t have to replace the 10 wheels on the garage door. They aren’t expensive, but it’s a pain because you have to take the hinge off in order to get the wheels out and replace them. If I do that, I’m just going to replace the hinges too. But it looks like I won’t need to do that for a while (knock on wood).
