good afternoon YouTube so I've been having some problems with this automatic door closer on my
garage door leading into the house it's been acting up recently where it'll get stuck and so
I went up and looked at that I've got the little arm disconnected but let me show you what's going
on up there yeah so here's the top of the unit it's got this arm that sits on a square shaft
and then that sits over there and then bolts in here let me see if I can get a wrench on there
rotate it as you open it up and then release it it's got a I guess it's got like a coil
spring and then a damper so there's a closed adjuster in an open adjuster on the end there
I'll show you that here yeah I think it closes slowly when it's wide open and then at the very
end you can have it closed a little bit faster so that it latches properly I think that's the
way it works but anyway this has been acting up and what I found was that end of the arm is not
really square anymore and in fact it's cracked right there I tried hammering the crap closed
yeah you can see what happens it's just so loose on that shaft that there's there's that much play
in the in that arm so I think I'm going to try squeezing this back together and then grind off
some of the paint and put a little bit of weld on there maybe I'll try to build up that hole a
bit and see if I can make it a little tighter fit okay YouTube I think that'll do the trick
what I did was hammered this shut a few times and then ran the part through the bandsaw and
kept whittling away this stretched metal here until it closed back up into a square this is
the middle on this side had stretched and then it finally cracked and now it's a pretty snug
fit on the square shaft so I'm going to grind this off and then try to put a couple of welds
on the cracked side here okay I just ran a weld bead around the outside with my MIG welder I have
to touch up that end a little bit I figured I'd build up the weld metal up a little bit higher
and then I could always grind it down because I think part of the problem is this the metal is a
little bit thinner than the square study is tall so I was thinking adding a little thickness on
there would also help the problem so yeah I think I need to do one more pass there and then start
grinding it down until it fits okay there we go YouTube's got the whole squared up I just had to
put a little extra weld along the broken side and then had to file that out little triangle file got
the little sharper than ninety degrees but look at that it fits right on there and it's pretty
snug fit right now so yeah I think that'll do the job so clean it up paint it and we'll try it out
in the morning once the paint's dry so I'll show you what that looks like yeah so there we go all
fixed you know open the door it stays open if I open it that far and then if I just open it
normally it closes slowly there and then the last section it speeds up so it clips into the latch I
have weather stripping around the door that you have to compress to get the latch to close so
yeah everything works and come pretty happy with that just give a shout-out to welder csr used
his welding build up technique there built up the metal on that pivot arm as I showed you until you
build it up with the weld bead and then you grind it back down and then I filed out the square hole
to just barely fit over that square shaft on top of the closer there and give it a coat of paint
and we're good to go so yeah if you have a door closer like that and you find that long straight
rod there gets loose on the shaft it's probably because that square hole has stretched out or in
my case one side broke it was a square shaft in a round hole and that doesn't work you got to get
that whole squared back up so yeah if you have a door like that need to fix it that's a good way
to go if you have any questions about that post up in the comment section below you can subscribe
to channel if you haven't already done so do enjoy videos like that and as always thanks for watching