Garage doors are an essential part of your home decor, but they often get neglected when you do other household repairs. This can lead to various issues, such as doors that get stuck or jammed, doors that open or close on their own, or doors that won’t stay open.
Most of these problems are caused by bent or misaligned frames or tracks that the door slides on, and they can be fixed easily with some basic tools, such as a hammer, a wrench, a screwdriver, and some nuts and bolts. Sometimes, the door may malfunction because of a faulty key in the opener control or a problem with the garage door opener circuit, which can also be repaired without much difficulty. However, when a major component of your garage door, such as the gears of the door opener, breaks down, you need a more complex repair. The following steps will show you how to fix and replace the damaged gears in your garage door opener.
You can tell if the gear is broken if your garage door doesn’t work even though the motor and the torsion springs are fine. The gears are usually made of plastic and are prone to wear and tear due to aging, lack of maintenance, imbalance in the garage door, or a manufacturing defect.
You can replace the gears yourself with some simple equipment and by following the instructions carefully.
First of all, you should cut off the power supply to the garage door to avoid any risk of electric shock and to prevent anyone from using the door while you are working on it. Then, you should manually close the door and detach it from the pulley to make sure the door doesn’t injure you while you are fixing it. Now you are ready to repair your garage door opener and change the gears.
You need to remove the retainer cap of the belt pulley and take out the sprocket. Then you can take off the chain or belt from the sprocket after marking its position and tape it to keep it from getting tangled or messy. Next, you need to remove the end covers, the drive gear, the retaining clip, and the RPM sensor, and disconnect the motor. There are some nuts that attach the motor to the shaft. You need to unscrew these nuts first. After you have taken off the motor from the drive shaft, you can take out the gear and replace it if needed. Then you need to put everything back together in the reverse order. Make sure that each part is in the right place to prevent any further trouble with your garage door. As you can see, replacing the worn out gears is not very easy. Therefore, if you are not sure about doing it yourself, you should contact a professional garage door repair service to handle it.