171–180 of 344 posts
The reason it's not expensive to have someone else do it is that if done properly it's not dangerous. Otherwise culture would be lumping garage door repairmen with emergency responders who take dangerous jobs but keep society functioning. You couldn't get it done for $200 if the career killed people frequently. The "if done properly" is critical, yes, if done wrong it's incredibly dangerous, but if you understand and…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If the garage door opener breaks, or the power is out, many people might have a really tough time opening the door manually without those springs. They might not be able to even do it at all. It is still, of course, a valid question to ask if it's worth having dangerous springs up there all the time for the rare event of the opener being inoperative. Or maybe we just shouldn't have doors that are that heavy?
My garage door is no longer connected to the opener, I just swing it up manually twice a day. My kid can do so as well without issue. Maybe mine is lighter.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Presumably because when they see the sticker they'll know that you called them without shopping around, so they'll quote you something ridiculous and bank on you not realizing you could easily get a second opinion.
Ah, the vendor doesn't run a generic repair shop? This makes sense if the only people that will call the vendor for a repair are the people who had the vendor install the thing in the first place.
> but the risk is comparable to doing your own car repairs "Comparable" in that it's way, way greater , sure. Unless we're talking dangerous car repairs, like using a spring compressor to disassemble a strut &c. Or using harbor freight jack stands.. When my spring broke, I thought someone crashed their car into my house. It's an incredible amount of energy. Garage door springs are up there with lathes & table saws, i…
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I don’t understand why it’s even considered safe to have one of these springs in one’s garage without a solid shield of some sort. While the energy involved is small on the scale of energy storage devices ( Which brings to mind some rather different designs. A rather small motor with a lot of mechanical advantage can easily open a close a garage door, and if a DC or low voltage AC motor is used, it could do so quite…
> A rather small motor with a lot of mechanical advantage can easily open a close a garage door, and if a DC or low voltage AC motor is used, it could do so quite a few times even if the power goes out. Garage doors are actually fairly heavy. By balancing the weight with a spring, you do a lot of favors to your mechanical advantage systems. (Eg: less wear, less advantage needed, the door can open in a reasonable amou…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If the garage door opener breaks, or the power is out, many people might have a really tough time opening the door manually without those springs. They might not be able to even do it at all. It is still, of course, a valid question to ask if it's worth having dangerous springs up there all the time for the rare event of the opener being inoperative. Or maybe we just shouldn't have doors that are that heavy?
They are surprisingly heavy, which is why you need such a beefy spring. When my spring broke a decade or so ago, I wasn't able to lift the door on my own, and with the assistance of my wife we were just barely able to lift it. Looks like they can easily be 200-500 lbs depend on materials (steel isn't light, but it's lighter than wood for this application), and I guess the issue is that you have to lift hundreds of po…
Is there something I'm missing? A quick search of YouTube reveals tons of garage door spring replacement videos. It doesn't seem like the knowledge or parts are difficult to obtain.
The page in question predates the founding of YouTube by ~3 years. It's in the middle of the Geocities time period, back when video distribution on the Internet was probably via Usenet and digital photography was probably on a Sony Mavica writing to floppy disks - or maybe to compact CDR if you were lucky.
Geocities was really dying by 2002. It had been bought by Yahoo! a few years previously, and they were intent on driving it into the ground.
Video distribution was indeed fairly rare, but Flash sites were very widespread, sometimes including video, but more often vector animations.
The Mavica was still around in 2002, although mostly in CD-R form. But cameras taking flash memory cards were also around, using a wild mix of CompactFlash, SmartMedia, Memory Stick, xD-Picture Card and MMC. SD had just been invented, and a year or so later I had my own cheap digital camera that took SD cards.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If the garage door opener breaks, or the power is out, many people might have a really tough time opening the door manually without those springs. They might not be able to even do it at all. It is still, of course, a valid question to ask if it's worth having dangerous springs up there all the time for the rare event of the opener being inoperative. Or maybe we just shouldn't have doors that are that heavy?
> many people might have a really tough time opening the door manually without those springs I think that would be most people. Who can lift over 450lbs from the ground?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Presumably because when they see the sticker they'll know that you called them without shopping around, so they'll quote you something ridiculous and bank on you not realizing you could easily get a second opinion.
Ah, the vendor doesn't run a generic repair shop? This makes sense if the only people that will call the vendor for a repair are the people who had the vendor install the thing in the first place.
To be clear, this is just me speculating about how such a scam would run, I've never seen it or heard of it.