h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Fixed it! For the complete job I had to make a tool with a variable shim so I could adjust the chain drive of our garage door opener. Ya' see, with the GFI quit, we had to use the Manual control to get the door open. Alas, the installer, lo' these many years ago, had not planned that any such thing should ever be necessary.

The manual mechanism releases itself from a shuttle that remains attached to the drive chain. The shuttle is NOT diminishingly thin and remains near the end of travel.... just where the door must rise and pass by.... or NOT!. It hung. I had to use a pry bar to prise the door past that shuttle in order to get the door open at all. Same kind of song when it came to closing it so as to increase security.

Unacceptable. So after work at night I had to run electricity out to the detached garage, detach the existing "height" bracket. Trial and error to find the minimum offset that allowed passage by the shuttle. Reattach. Using the manual system, put the car back in for the night. (Our neighborhood is plagued by a multi-year serial, double tire stabber.)

Only then did I attack the original problem of failing GFI. The new one was about $15 U.S. This new one was ***almost*** a clone of the original from 1985. Not clony enough. I got the LOAD and LINE wires interchanged and only a trip under the house (ours is pier and beam) to disconnect the possibly unsafe garage load, I sorted it out. BACK under the house to reconnect the garage circuit. Installation involves 8 steps (repeated since i had connected it wrong) so it took awhile.

But, bottoms up with this Lone Star beer bottle, it all works again, BETTER than it has worked in many a year.

THAT IS WHY I am celebrating with a trip to h2g2.

Next up is the abnormally noisy central air conditioner fan motor (Hey! its reaching 35 degrees C with 40% humidity Thursday) and dealing with this excruciating sinus headache attack that occurs about every 4 years.