Rufus The Doofus

I know this photo doesn’t look like anything like slave labor but it’s there. You just have to look for it.

Did you know that Ohio has some of the best slave laborers in the lower 48 States?

For the price of airfare, food and beer you too can have your very own Buckeye State slave laborer. It’s a great deal. You should look into it if you have retired relatives in Ohio.

So where’s the slave labor in the photo above? It’s the right garage door and the fact that it now opens. We installed a torsion spring system and an I-Drive garage door opener yesterday. It took all day and then some to get it almost working correctly.

Ever since I got the car storage lift for the Mustang I haven’t had a spring assist system on the garage door. Have you ever tried to lift a garage door with no springs? They’re heavy. Really damn heavy. I had to modify the garage door rails in order to make room for the car to fit on the lift with enough overhead clearance and under-lift clearance. It’s really a tight fit but it all works.

I bought the EZ-Set torsion spring system and the I-Drive torsion opener a couple of years ago. I knew I’d get around to installing it some day. (Interesting trivia note: I first saw the I-Drive opener system in Uncle Tom’s garage.) The EZ-Set torsion spring system is very easy to setup once you read the installation manual. We decided to read it four hours into the install.

The I-Drive opener isn’t so easy. Sure, it seems easy to install when you read the instruction manual but it’s really a PITA to get it working properly. I would not recommend this system to anyone that I liked. I have the whole thing figured out now but there’s a lot of info that’s not covered in the installation manual. If you run into any problems during the auto-programming step you’re pretty much screwed. The manual doesn’t tell you how to deal with it. It actually specifically instructs you to not do certain things that you absolutely must do in order to get the damn thing working if it’s unable to complete the auto-programming step. I don’t recommend this opener. However, I do recommend finding a slave to help you install it of you’re unfortunate enough to already own one of the things.

The I-Drive torsion system mounts on the wall above the garage door and is excellent for low-clearance installations. That’s it in the photo above. It really is an ingenious design and should work well for most small doors in typical installations. My doors aren’t typical. They are 7′x9′ but are a high-lift configuration to get the door up close to the 11 foot high ceilings in the garage. The I-Drive’s fancy electronics don’t seem to like this configuration. It “learns” the lift characteristics for your door based on current load or some other sensing mechanism. Since my door lifts higher and longer than a typical doors the I-Drive kinda gets confused. I eventually was able to get it to work consistently but it will only lift up to the height of the right door in the first photo above, about 6′6″. That’s not a problem for me since the car lift is there. But it would be a problem if I needed the full 7 foot door height.

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