Jsdirt

Wow that door is HUGE! Must've been a 2-man job I bet. Looks great though. Happy Thanksgiving everyone.

I taped the safety sensors together, facing each other, and placed them on top of the motor on the side with the new door. Hate those damn things. I installed the opener back in '03 when we moved in. Tried and tried to defeat those sensors, but that company sure doesn't want you to do that. I have to hit the button in the truck, then walk out the closing door ... otherwise I have to dig through my pile of keys to lock the 2 locks on the side door. In the summer, the door and jambs swell, making that task a pain in the ass. Much easier to just lock the door from inside, then escape while the door is closing. Stupid sensors wouldn't let me do that. Apparently lawyers have had their way with garage door opener manufacturers ... The other door's opener is a 30+ year old Alistair unit. Chain driven & indestructible. Not a safety device to be found on that one.

Ain't that the truth!

Luckily it wasn't the big, heavy, old wooden garage doors we have out here - would've torn the light off and done quite a bit of damage. I still have one old one, and one new one. The new one is weaker than a tin can. Only 6 years old and covered in dents already ...

At least it didn't dent anything that I can see from the pics. If you just breathe wrong on my truck, it crumples like a friggin beer can ... Got a nice ding on the rear quarter from just barely tapping it with a weedwacker. Then, got some scratches all the way through the clear and base to the primer, from friggin forsythia branches. Talk about weak paint.

Been my experience that any time that sensor is removed, a crank relearn is needed. Might get lucky and not need one, but I wouldn't count on that ... Should be able to find either a small shop or someone on Craigslist with a Tech 2 that'll do it for cheap.

This place needs an overhaul. House is roughly 1600 sq.ft. total - living space is less than that. Used to feel the wind blow through the walls laying in bed, when we had our bedroom on the second floor. We've since closed down the entire second floor to storage. Was costing us a fortune to try and heat up there. Only option for this place is spray foam insulation. Big $$$, even if I do the work myself (ALOT of work too - who knows the cans of worms that will be opened gutting this place). Not gonna happen anytime soon.

We have oil as our main heating. Even at the current prices it would still cost a fortune to heat this place using only that. Wish I could just turn the dial, but no money trees growing out back here. Would be close to $3k a season. Was double that a few years ago!

Free is good! I've got a pretty sketchy chimney, so burning wood here would be a big risk. Besides the fact I have zero time for cutting and splitting the amount needed to keep this drafty 170 year old place from freezing. Would take 6-8 cords a year, I figure. As it is, we burn almost 6 tons of coal a season.

Anthracite coal would work too, but it would cost you a fortune to burn it, since it comes only from PA. Can't burn in a fireplace - would need a stoker (just like a pellet stove) or hand-fired stove. They'd never know you were burning. We have that same Dyson vac. Just had to spend some money fixing the thing. Had it almost 13 years now.

I'd burn after sundown.

That cold front hasn't quite made it here yet, but it's coming. We ended up at 38° this morning from a low of 32° in the middle of the night. Front is supposed to hit tonight - should be 20's overnight for the next few days. Thank God for coal-fired boilers.

They keep telling us the snow isn't going to make it here ... but I'm looking at the radar right now and wondering how sure they are about that ... Guess I'd better fire up the generator and snowblower, just in case.

At least I got to experience 76° last week while down near Panama City, FL last week. Today here in MA, the high was 47°. Currently 35° and dropping ... I hear ya Sarah - the cold makes me hate life too!

I hear that! Snow means it's cold out ... and I HATE cold weather. I figure I hate snow by default.

Or east! I hate snow. Every storm takes a year off the truck's life. Road salt central over here ...

85 (power) & 86 (ground) need power from the high beams in order to trip the relay, and turn the fogs on. Easiest way would be to get power from the High beams (only when on, so 87 or 30 depending on how it's wired) onto 85 of the fog relay, then make sure 86 has a good ground (or vice versa - you'd have to test them - my memory is foggy).

The touch-free ones are anyway. Hit one today to get 5k miles of road crap and giant FL bugs off the front. Can see the film a mile away, but it looks 10x better than it did. My black truck looked flat gray. Had to go pick up a dead E-350, so no time to bust out the buckets and hose. Seems I haven't had time for those things in over a year now ...

The fog relay must not be getting juice, or, might not be supplying juice to the fogs. 85 & 86 need power to flow through, to create a magnetic field that connects 87 & 30 together. If you were to manually touch 87 to 30, the fogs should come on.

Just another system to break and cost $$$. Imagine the carnage (and noise) when the valve lets go ... and we all know it will. There was a time when I trusted automakers to design a good, reliable system. Those days are long gone. Cheap is the name of the game today, unfortunately. Good idea, if they could make it failure-PROOF.

But then, how will you seal against 3000 psi of force when the mixture ignites? No easy answers. My solution is to just go back to having a filter on the valve cover. It worked ... and nobody died from breathing it.

Mine squeaked and rattled all the way home from the dealer the day I bought it, and continues to do so. Lots of Monday, and Friday-before-Christmas trucks rolling off GM's assembly lines ...

I saw a bunch of those in my buddy's trash container. They were easy to catch since it was 50° out at the time. The ones in Phoenix you can't even get near. They move at the speed of light in that triple-digit summer heat! Like I always say ... it doesn't much matter what brand you buy nowadays. Going cheap is the name of the game in any line of manufacturing today. Everything fails before it should, and is shoddily built ... aside from DR power equipment, but that's off topic.

Neighbor has an '09 Escape. I don't blame you there, having worked on this thing a couple times. Ford took a painfully simple design that has been around for decades - the door latch - and incorporated cheap plastic and electronics. This not only made it unreliable, but STUPIDLY expensive at the same time. $340 at Ford - cannot be disassembled to repair the .00001 cent chinese plastic part that broke. Nope! Have to replace the whole assembly. What a friggin joke! Plus, it took 45 minutes for me to extract it. Edited the price - I was $100 too high, but still stupidly priced!

Turns out, the MASSIVELY HUGE Florida stinkbugs enjoy my Silverado. Odd. Never seen ones this big in my life!! Holy crapper ... all the insects are huge down there.