Yesterday, after posting about bumping my head on the garage door, I decided to learn about how to link to a specific post in WordPress (which is still very new-to-me software about which I know almost nothing) and I posted the link in my Facebook status to test how it works.
Various Facebook Friends “liked” and/or commented upon that post. One asked me a question which I felt ought to be answered. I have quoted it below:
Steven Green Why don’t you open it all the way?
Glad to hear you’re ok.
My Facebook reply to Steven’s question is quoted below:
There’s quite a story to that too.Originally there were two holes drilled in the bottom of the roller door equidistant from the centrepoint and a loop of very thin rope ran between those two holes so that if the door went all the way up you could use the rope to pull it down again.That rope used to break time and time again and we replaced it time and time again. To reach the door if the rope had broken twice, thus leaving no rope to grab, involved getting the stepladder and carrying it down 38 steps to the garage, as the door was far too high for anyone in our family to grab.If the door is rolled up more than two bricks above the bottom of the window, it goes upwards to the very top of its own accord. This happens because the heavy locking mechanism has passed the centre of the roller towards the inside of the garage and its weight, being greater than the weight of the remaining part of the roller door hanging on the outside of the spindle, is enough to cause the roller to continue to rotate, dragging the rest of the door all the way up to the very top.So there is about half a brick (they are courses of something like “Besser” bricks, so taller than house bricks) of difference between the door going up of its own accord and Ben or I banging our heads on the door. So there is about four inches of range in which the door will stay put and no heads can bang on it.After having replaced the skinny little ropes over and over again, and after having to bring the stepladder down 38 steps to replace the rope and then carrying it back up 38 steps again after the rope was replaced, we decided as a family not to continue replacing ropes, but rather to open the door until the bottom was just two bricks above the bottom of the garage windows so that the door would remain where it was rather than rolling all the way up out of reach.Our landlord will not allow us to fit any other mechanism, electric or otherwise, even at our own expense, to overcome the garage door’s anti-social personality, so we are stuck with a system of having to be very precise about exactly where we leave the garage door when we open it.Now, before I hit the Enter key, I shall copy this reply and save it for possible use in the blog.
Now who would have thought how much of a family’s history could be brought back to mind by a little insignificant bump to the head!