We interrupt this build for some unscheduled emergency maintenance

Ah, home ownership. The joys never end.

We were heading out in the car last weekend, all packed up and literally just leaving the garage when I heard a strange friction kind of noise on the roof. Not quite scraping, but definitely not something we typically heard. Took an extra second to pull back in and watch the garage door, and it turns out it wasn't going all the way up. Put it all the way down again, and then it wouldn't come up at all. Oh boy.

Pulled the handle off and the door at least still went all the way up manually, so the door itself and the tracks were fine. We got out of the garage at least and when we got back we parked in the driveway so I could get a closer look at the opener. I suspected a belt problem and yup, there one was.

There should be belt there, not just steel cabling. Ooops. 

So I got to spend a week of April snow and freezing rain parking outside and having an extra few steps getting the kids to school while I decided between just switching out a part and just buying a whole new opener. I was awfully tempted to just buy a whole new system, but ultimately after some sleuthing I just bought a replacement belt. At least I hoped it was a replacement belt.

I spent that week watching and re-watching a video on replacing the belt so when it finally got delivered I was ready to go. Even with more papers to write I was happy to both have a break and hopefully start parking inside again. It's kind of ridiculous how little I appreciated regular covered parking until it was taken away.

Old belt. 

New belt

Old hardware to take off and re-use. 

All I ordered was a belt, so the first step was taking off the old one and re-installing the clips on the new one. Didn't sound too hard, but it turns out the gear on the door side is literally right up against the wall, so it took some additional finessing. Of course something else wasn't installed properly here. Shouldn't have been surprised.

Huh. Yeah, that doesn't seem right. 

Anyway, eventually I got things off and got the new belt on. I probably need to tighten it on more but at this point I just wanted to be sure it worked. This was a joyous sight.

And now things are back to normal, for less than the cost of replacing an entire unit, and I can say it's another thing I've taken care of myself. At least I had time to get it done, even if it did end up taking away from my weekend table building time.