New BuildMark garage-door opener

The Keed with the dreaded D100 with flash.

New BuildMark garage-door opener.

Our electrical garage-door opener finally gave up.
Actually, I was expecting the garage-door would give up first.
Our 94-year-old nosy neighbor had to replace all his garage-doors last year.
A panel on one went akilter and jammed the whole kabosh.
It also didn’t help he had rammed a door with his car.
He has three doors, each about eight feet wide by seven feet high.
Ours, only one door, is gigantic: 8' by 16'. The builder wanted to install two doors, each 8' by 7'. (“Looks right that way.”)
Nothing doing!
With two doors I gotta shovel out both sides. With one door I can jimmy both cars out one side.
(This happened after a few years during a gigantical blizzard.)
I also had to have eight feet high to clear the E250.
Plus the E250 wouldn’t thread a single eight-foot-wide door. Too wide over the mirrors.
And I wasn’t changin’ the oil on that sucker outside in the snow any more.
So it’s a gigantical 16 by 8 foot door; the largest residential garage-door available at that time.
From what I can see, the door still works pretty good.
We had to open it manually in place of the failed opener, and it still tracks fine; although it’s monstrously heavy (needing two people).
I’ve had to make a few minor repairs over the years.
The hinges are screwed into the stamped aluminum panel-casings with sheetmetal screws — a failure waiting to happen. (The panel-casings are filled with Styrofoam.)
Regional Transit installed garage-doors constructed this way on its bus-garages — they lasted about four months.
That door-replacement project was bid out by my old railfan friend Chip, and I told him that construction would never last.
Them doors are being worked 10 or more times a day, so I knew the hinge-attachments would pull out.
I had already relocated hinges on my residential door.
Mine kept pulling so much I finally through-bolted the whole kabosh and seated with fender-washers.
I think I’ve done that with a third of the hinges.
The sheetmetal screws also rust; and are steel in aluminum.

The Keed with the dreaded D100 with flash.

New BuildMark garage-door opener.

But they ain’t the opener.
It would hesitate when lifting, so I have a hunch it had a nylon gear inside which had stripped.
After all, it’s lifting a heavy door, and the unit is 18 years old.
I wanted to pursue this repair myself, for once; despite my difficulty speaking.
And I suppose it was just as well. They suggested a standard door-opener for a single 8 by 7.
“Oh no,” I said. “This is a huge door: 16 by 8.”
They ramped up to a larger, more powerful unit; saving a service-call where they could conclude the smaller unit wouldn’t suffice.
They also wanted to give me only one remote.
“Well, I need two,” I said.
Like Jack’s Denali, the Bucktooth Bathtub has an integral door-trigger. But why go to all of the trouble of programming that thing when an extry remote is only $20?

“The E250” is our 1979 Ford Econoline van, “250” because it was rated at three-quarter tons. Probably the neatest vehicle we’ve ever owned. Old Henry (Ford) would have been proud.

For 16&1/2 years I drove transit bus for Regional Transit Service, the transit-bus operator in Rochester, N.Y.

“Chip” is my friend Charles Walker. He worked at Regional Transit in management, and like me is a railfan.

“The dreaded D100” is my Nikon D100 digital camera. (My siblings don’t approve; they noisily insist I should use point-and-shoot like them.)

RE: “I wanted to pursue this repair myself, for once; despite my difficulty speaking.......” —I had a stroke October 26, 1993, which slightly compromised my speaking.

“Jack” is my loudmouthed macho brother-from-Boston (Jack Hughes) who noisily badmouths everything I do or say. He has a GMC Denali. “The Bucktooth-Bathtub” is our 2005 Toyota Sienna van; called that because it’s white and like sitting in a bathtub, and appears to have a bucktooth on the grill.