Hi everyone and welcome back to the Sawickipedia! Today we're gonna have a look
at some maintenance and repair that we can do on our garage door, specifically a
roller door. So I'm gonna start off with the simplest things first and we'll
slowly move up to more complex things beyond that, but to start off with these
should be possible for almost anyone to do. So let's just open up the door and
we'll have a listen to how it sounds and also see what it looks like as it opens up.
Okay so first of all let's have a look at why it's making that squeaking noise.
One thing you will need is a ladder and I'll
try and capture this on the other camera that we've got here. So it is a bit hard
to see but inside there is basically a giant spring which is under a whole lot
of tension, just see if we can see it any better from the other side, well that's a
lot better, so this spring here is under an extreme amount of tension. Basically
what that does is when you lift the roller door up and down it basically
removes any effort to lift it up and down, so that spring it's pretty much
holding the weight of the roller door itself. So the reason it's making that
noise is when the roller door is moving about those springs are basically
getting more and more compressed or decompressed, so all we're gonna do is
just lubricate those springs. Now we're going to use silicon spray, ignore that
it's wd-40 it's just their brand, but any silicon spray would do, whatever you find
off the shelf they pretty much all work the same, but just try and get one with a
nice long nozzle like this. And we basically want to try and lubricate
those springs, so there's two ways to do this
if you've got your garage door closed or as low as it'll go you should be able to
get that nozzle right up in behind and just sort of spray about. Now on this
particular door there's a spring in this section here, and the other one is on
this section here, depending on the width of the garage door there may be multiple
springs, there may be longer springs, but given that I know where these two are
I'm gonna start by spraying a whole bunch of silicon spray just on
these two edges. So I'm inserting it up behind the actual roller door itself and
if you've got access along the sides of the roller door you can pretty much
spray up in there as well and just give it a real good coating, this stuff's not
really going to do any damage to anything else, just bear in mind that if
you've got a motor on one side like this, probably best to just switch it off
before you go spraying anything.
And just try and give those springs of real good coating - go nuts.
Also a good idea to wear eye protection, I probably should have mentioned that
earlier, given that I wear glasses it's close enough. All right let's just turn
it back on...
So there is still a little bit of squeaking,
definitely is not as apparent as it was before.
I'll just spray these down again and yes I'm going against my own advice here and
haven't turned off the power.
Let's give that another try.
So there is still a little bit of squeaking but definitely not as apparent
as it was before, and you know it'll take a few goes up and down to really sort
that out, and probably a couple more sprays with the silicon lubricant, but in
general that's all you need to do. I don't know if the camera is showing this
but there's actually some that's come down on the door, you can just wipe that
off if you're really worried about it, I don't really care, it's just a roller door. So
that's the first part and if all you were doing was just a bit of maintenance
and just getting rid of some of those squeaks then you can pretty much stop
here, but if we want to go a bit further the next thing we should look at is the
guide rails on either side of the door. We want to clean these out and just
lubricate them a little bit, so once again I'll open up the door.
And obviously it's harder to see me at the moment but all you really want to do
is just clean out these guide rails. I'm gonna use just brake cleaner, pretty much it
will get any gum or grease off these rails, and then follow that up with a
good soaking of the silicon spray. Now if you are using brake cleaner or pretty
much anything keep in mind that it's gonna destroy any cloths that you use or
any rags so don't use the t-shirt unless you want to throw it away afterwards, and
keep in mind with brake cleaner pretty much any metal painted services that
gets on or any paint it will start to eat away, so be careful where you're
spraying this, don't spray it on your car. So I just spray it on the cloth, probably
should also wear gloves,
there's a lot of things you should do, but as you can see just from that quick
wipe, you can see it if it wasn't so bright in here. We'll try and get a bit
better view, so from that quick wipe you can see it's quite dirty so just rinse
and repeat.
Just to give you an idea of where we're up to, so I've cleaned out this side and it's
looking pretty clean let's just compare it to the other side and oh yeah there's
still a bit of filth in there. So we'll get that cleaned out as well, if you're
happy with how clean it is now as I said just spray it down with a bit more silicon
lubricant on each side, but you can also take it one step further and what I'm
going to do is remove these guardrails. If you've got a spanner or a socket or
impact wrench either one of one will do. Obviously this is the easiest option but
not everyone is going to have these lying around,
and this should just maneuver out around the door and hopefully if I can block
out enough the light you may actually be able to see why I wanted to remove it. So
this is the top part which isn't actually accessible because the door's in
the way, see I really want to get that cleaned out.
If you do take these off you will have to realign them with the doors when you
put them back on. I'm just gonna it's gonna disengage this and bring the door
down, keep in mind that because there's only one rail and the door will be very
flimsy. So I'm just gonna do one rail at a time, so I'll clean this up,
I'll also this gives us an opportunity to actually clean the edges of
the door itself as well. So I'll give that a good clean out too and then we'll
stick that rail back up, obviously we'll have to open the door again get the rail
back up, and then we'll do the same thing on the other side next.
I'll just clean up this edge of the door as well.
Alright I'm pretty happy with that, let's put the rail back on, so lift up the door
again keep in mind this edge is just going to be able to flop around so you
want to sort of at least try and guide it so that the door goes up smoothly but
obviously don't cut your hand open. As I'm lifting it I'm sort of pushing it to
make sure that it stays in that other guardrail. Okay we'll put this rail back on.
Now this point I've just sort of loosely done up the bolts, even when you've
finished and you want to tighten them up don't do it too tight because you'll
just destroy the anchor that they're in and you'll cause yourself more headaches.
So the guardrail's just loosely on just so it's not shifting about just until we
get the alignment right. The easiest way to work that out is if the door goes up
and down freely it means that it's not too tight so it's not pushing in on the
door, but at the same time as you move the door up and down you don't want any
side-to-side movement, but even just having it closed right now I can see
that there is a big gap on this side, so I'm gonna leave it closed and move these
brackets in.
Okay so the door moves up and down freely and I can see that there's
little play in the door. There's still a little bit at the
bottom but as long as it's not really shuttering around, that'll do for now
because we're gonna take the other side off so we're gonna have to align that
again to.The other way to do this is once you've got the guardrail in place
put the door down pretty much squeeze the guardrail on to the door and then
just back it off by a couple of mills and that it should leave enough room but
it could be a bit of trial and error.
Okay so this side has been cleaned, lubricated, we'll do the other side, you
won't have to watch me doing that it's the exact same process so we'll come
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