New Garage Door Motor

Time to do some handyman stuff today. Our old garage door motor (still hanging from the ceiling in the pic) crapped out this weekend (a holiday weekend—I suppose that's good as it gave me an extra day to do this, although I really didn't want to as I had just replaced the printed circuit boards a couple of years ago to be able to use our vehicles' built-in HomeLink garage door buttons). If your vehicle is equipped with HomeLink then you likely have garage door buttons built in to your rear-view mirror (like in our car) or overhead console (like in our truck). So when buying a new one (lying in the box on the floor) I made sure it supported HomeLink.

The new motor with its rail and direct drive assembled on the floor. Our old one was a chain-drive unit. At the store they had three types of units: chain drive (cheapest), direct (screw) drive (middle-of-the-road), and belt drive (top-of-the-line). I'm not sure why belt drive was the most expensive. I'm pretty sure that belt drive is better than chain drive, but I also thought that direct drive topped them all. At least that's how I think it is with motorbikes (my first bike was a chain drive, my Harley has belt). The main reason for my thinking of direct drive's superiority is that it does not need tensioning—both chains and belts will need to be tensioned somehow. The screw, on the other hand, just turns in place while the little carriage attached to the door gets pushed/pulled as the screw turns. What was interesting about this setup was how it got connected—via this coupling and sleeve. Not very hard to assemble at all.

Ok, here are two shots, one from when I thought I had hung the new motor correctly, and the next from its final position. See the difference? I botched my first attempt because I followed the instructions to the letter—install the motor and rail lined up with the door center. Wrong...the door center lacks bracket supports to which the door J-arm needs to connect to. Just off-center, however, there is a metal bracket that even has pre-drilled holes for various garage door motor manufacturers. Sure enough, when I looked more closely there were holes pre-drilled for Genie brackets. The center of the door is quite flimsy and after I had first screwed in the bracket I was really afraid that I could rip out the screws by hand. So I was quite relieved to find the metal support, even though it was off-center. And that's how it was set up initially, so it made sense. But, that meant that I had to reposition the whole damn thing a second time. Oh well, once I had that metal cross-member hung from the ceiling at the right distance, repositioning the head unit a couple of inches wasn't a big deal. So at right you see the final installation. Now of course, the HomeLink still doesn't work! So I'm back to square one—how to reprogram the vehicles so they can actually use the stupid garage door opener? I'll try tomorrow...

UPDATE: The next day I google'd for the solution and found it (how did we live without google before? Or the internet for that matter—a large number of manufacturers' manuals can be found online these days). The trick is to press buttons 2 and 3 simultaneously and hold for a few seconds. The lights flash and what I think happens is that the HomeLink unit either resets itself or gets put into learn mode. I guess it doesn't reset itself because button 1 still worked and all I wanted to do was program button 2. After pressing 2 and 3 simultaneously, press and hold 2. Wait for that to blink. Then go up to the motor head unit and press its button. Then press (and hold? I don't remember now!) button 2 in the vehicle. The slow blink turns to a rapid blink, I guess to let you know that it's detected the motor head's signal. Of course the best part is when button 2 is pressed again and the damn door actually starts moving! Anyway, both doors are working once again and hopefully this post will remind me how to install the replacement motor unit for when the other old chain-drive unit conks out.