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From: Archimedes Plutonium on 30 May 2010 02:37
A very strange thing happened to me both yesterday and today. I closed
the garage door, of which I have
double garage doors, and as I closed the door, I felt the
door come crashing to the cement, and instantly realized that the
coiled torsion spring inside had broken. So I went inside the house to
get to the garage
since the other door was all blocked off and inaccessible. And as I
inspected the problem, sure enough the torsion spring had snapped.

So, now I had a problem on my hands since the door
was too heavy for me to lift for it had 5 sections of metal panels and
would have to get a "farm jack" to
begin to lift it or enlist some neighborly help.

And so I had the remainder of the night to think of the
best solution. And I came up with the idea that I would
use the other garage door and move the stuff that was
blocking it. The other door was smaller with only 4 panels. So early
this morning I started to move the stuff. And opened the door and
tested it out and it was
not as smooth of motion as my primary door, and maybe it just needed
some lubrication. But later on in
today, I closed this door after fetching a lawnmower and funny, how
this second door torsion spring also
broke and the door came crashing down on the cement
also. Another checkup from inside and sure enough the
spring broke also. And both of them broke about the same exact
distance in the springs.

So is this a probability fluke? Or is this somewhat
probable, that a manufacturer of torsion springs would have equal
quality on the springs that they would last for the same years and
break within 24 hours of one
another? Could it be that they had the same weathering
history that they would break almost on the very same
day?

Now I was not wanting to have such a problem come my way on this
weekend, for I was not caught up on alot of work that needs my dire
attention. And here I have my pickup inside a two car garage with no
door
working, so that if an emergency comes up, I cannot
get in my vehicle and go anywhere.

So I give myself an A+++ today in mechanical engineering of doing my
scheduled work for the day, but also, spending a brief 2 hours to fix
one of those
doors that I can get in and out of.

I hate torsion spring garage doors because they are
dangerous and too many moving parts and the torsion
settings are very much unreliable with that silly and darn "set
screw". I have heard horror stories of people
losing fingers on those torsion springs.

What I do love is the most simple mechanics and in the case of garage
doors, I prefer the pulley with a weight attachment. The only bad
thing about this setup
is that in case the weight falls and it could do some damage to the
cement or whatever it falls on, especially if a person is underneath
the weight. So what I do in that case is, I finish with some catchment
system like a board plank that guides the weight into
a sand box should it happen to fall some future date.

But within two hours of my time, I had a setup of a steel 50 lb weight
on both sides of the door to reduce the overall weight of the door to
a minus 100 lbs. It is
not easy for me to open and close, but manageable,
and the A+++ is for the fact that I had a serious problem and with
materials on hand I solved it within
two hours. And tomorrow I can do the same thing with
the other door for I have enough of the same materials
on hand.

The old torsion springs worked well for decades, but the day the set
screw gets loose or that spring breaks
is not as good of a system as the mere pulley and
weights.

So I will not replace a torsion spring with another torsion spring but
rather elminate those springs and
set up a pulley system.

This incident also brings up a idea that has been
brewing in my mind for some time. That a environment where I collect
materials and buy materials gets to a
point of what I call "levels or hierarchies of on site materials".
Levels of organization and we see this in
broader life, such as the difference between a big city
and a small town that we can expect the big city to
carry and hold almost all materials when we need them, whereas the
small town seldom has materials
needed on hand.

So that today I had chains and D ring couplers and I had steel
weights, all ready to go on fixing the problem.
I even had spare pulleys.

Archimedes Plutonium
http://www.iw.net/~a_plutonium/
whole entire Universe is just one big atom
where dots of the electron-dot-cloud are galaxies
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