Garage doors are an integral part of your house furnishing but unfortunately, most of the times they are left unattended to whenever a repair of the household is undertaken. Hence many people are faced with problems of the like of sticking or jammed doors, unwarranted opening of the doors or its not staying open.
As far as sticking or jammed doors are concerned, it is usually because of deformed frames or channels through which the door slides and they can be easily repaired without much hassle. Usually, with a simple toolkit of a hammer, a wrench a few nut and bolts and a screw driver, you can fix most of these problems by yourself. The erratic opening and closing of the door might be due to a depressed key in the opener control or there might be some problem with the opener circuit of the which can easily be fixed. But the problem arises when some major part of it develops a defect, for example, the gears of the door opener. In such cases, a more involved repair is required. Hopefully, the following steps would give you some useful insight about repairing and replacing the worn out gears in your opener.
You can understand if the gear has broken even though the motor is working properly and the torsion springs are intact. These gears, usually made of plastic, are among the weaker parts of the opener and can be damaged due to several reasons like old age, prolonged usage without maintenance, imbalance in the garage door or may be due to a manufacturing defect.
But, with a few simple equipments and following the instructions properly, you can change these gears on your own.
First and foremost, you should disconnect the electric supply to the garage door to prevent any chance of electrocution and also so that no one operates the door while you are working on it. Next, you should close the door manually and remove it from the pulley to ensure that the door does not accidentally hurt you while you are servicing it. Now you are ready to set about repairing your opener and replace the gears.
Now you need to open the retainer cap of the belt pulley and remove the sprocket. Now you can remove the chain or belt from the sprocket after marking its position and tape it to prevent it from getting twisted up and messy. Then remove the end covers, the drive gear, the retaining clip and the RPM sensor and also disconnect the motor. An assembly of nuts holds the motor to the shaft. You need to remove these nuts first. Once you have removed the motor from the drive shaft, you can remove the gear and replace it if necessary. Having replaced the gear, you need to start reassembling the entire system in the exactly opposite manner. Take care to see to it that each part goes into the right place to avoid any further problem with your garage door. Thus, we see that changing the worn out gears is a bit more involved. Hence, if you are not very confident about doing it yourself, you should call a professional garage door repair service to tend to the matter.
