Several months ago, I replaced the double car garage door’s opener, it wasn’t too hard as I used the existing mounting hardware from the old opener. I followed the instructions, pinned up the new rail and lifted the motor unit to the hangers. I had a working garage door in about 3 hours. But as luck has it, the other garage door opener, (which also has a date stamp of 96), started to make some funky sounds and then bam, failed the same way. The drive gear has worn to nothing. Trying to stretch a opener replacement, I thought let’s take it apart and see if it’s salvageable.
Upon inspection, it was the drive gear that has worn down to nothing. I looked online and it seems to be a common happening. I bought a new gear on Amazon and thought I was good to go. The part came in and it is affixed via two roll pins. I found a 5/32″ punch and started to knock a roll pin out. It would not budge. Urgh… what should be Plan B… It’s the Z420 all over again.
Well fast forward to when I fixed the drive gear. I dremeled a chunk out of the old gear so it could be removed without the pins out of the way… then with just the roll pins extruding from the axle… I was able to hammer the roll pins without the punch with a ball-peen hammer. They budged like it was nothing. I put on a new gear and slapped the door opener back together. Done! or so i thought.
Pressing the roll pin back through the shaft… No wonder I couldn’t punch it out.
The opener made tons of noise, plus the travel stops didn’t work on the way down… which is not okay. I have to figure out why. I looked for differences between the belt drive shaft I put in versus the old chain drive shaft I took out. There seems to be missing… metal in the top bushing. So luckily I also bought a parts kit, which i was hoping I could have just returned but I needed a part or actually replaced all the parts (might as well).
New bushing versus… well what’s left of the old one.
At the end, it’s still not what I was hoping for (still more noise than I would like). We’ll see how much life my rebuild will give me and then I’ll just replace the entire opener in a more convenient time.
Shaft and its parts… the second from the bottom is the “bushing” that looks more like a second washer.