Shop Talk: Garage Door Tune-up
In general, I try to keep a tidy shop although we all know, shop spaces cycle between the extreme states of “everything is where it belongs” and “a tornado came through here”. I’m not exactly sure what motivated me to tackle the garage door specifically, but I think it was something along the lines of ‘general tidying up’ and or some sense of seasonal prep. I don’t think about it too much - my neighbor does say I’m a glutton for work though so maybe that has something to do with it.
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How this started
So funny enough, this started entirely because the garage door brace bars were dirty. Yep. This was supposed to be a ‘how long could it possibly take to wipe down a few support bars’ activity — I legit thought this would be a five minute job.
Looks like just a bit of dust on the support bars and the door, how long could this take?
Step 1 - The door braces
So at first, I thought I could just get a roll of paper towels, spray it with some Mr. Clean and call it a day. Maybe I’d have to come back for a second wipe but it’d be done, easy peasy.
I looked around for a stronger degreaser, but I didn’t have anything handy — until my wife suggested I use [literally] oven cleaner. I had previously bought a bottle of Goo Gone Oven Cleaner to clean the oven (I had wanted to try a non-aerosol oven cleaner) and found that Goo Gone was not very effective at all as an oven cleaner; as a garage door brace cleaner, it worked a lot better although I think the biggest improvement was busting out the hard steel scrubbies and just brute-force scrubbing it right off.
I really didn’t want to remove the braces but in the end, I gave in and unbolted them from the door and brought it to the backyard. After this much effort, I opted to spray paint it on the hope that this would be an easier surface to keep clean down the road.
While I was waiting for the spray paint to set - since I had direct access to the wood panelling anyways, I opted to give the door itself a wipe down. I happened to have a can of Liquid Gold, so that’s what I used. I thought the black paint contrasted very well with the now slightly-glossy warm colors of the door.
Looking good!
Of course, now that the support bars and the wood was cleaned up and looking great, the blegh-ness of those hinges was very glaring eyesore. Of course, this meant that I had to take a loser look at those.
Step 2 - The (inner) hinges
I originally wanted to continue the brown and black theme here with the plan of removing the hinge, cleaning it up and painting that black as well. Upon closer inspection though, there isn’t really an easy way to disassemble the hinge — which meant that any spray paint I applied would just end up mucking up the hinge functionality. I could plug/tape the hole but that I still didn’t like this as I figured any lubrication I might apply would then interfere with the paint. I ultimately opted to just clean the hinges and leave it at that.
Compared to the bars though, hinges are gross. Oven cleaner wasn’t cutting it — I went right tor ZEP Purple and even still, this involved a lot of scrubbing and a fresh pair gloves for every hinge. I initially did one set of hinges as a test to see if it was salvageable (or if it made more sense to just buy new hinges)
As I was removing some of the hinges, I noticed that some of the lags screws had more rust than others and in an odd way too: each hinge is held on by four lag screws, top to bottom; the screws at the top always exhibited more rust than the screws at the bottom. Since I didn’t want to go through this amount of effort again for a very long time (if ever), I ordered some #14x1” stainless sheet metal screws to replace these lags. There were a few holes that were already worn out so I used 5/16x1 stainless lag screws on a case by case basis.
Step 3 - The (outer) hinges
The outer hinges are the ones that have the rollers on them and these are extra gross. When I got to doing these, it was definitely a change of gloves for each one since the amount of grease involved went up exponentially.
This process was gross but slow and steady — except for one hinge. I had a nut that had seized onto the bolt and would spin the bolt. There wasn’t a whole lot of room to grab the bolt so I initially tried grinding a slot into the end of the bolt and using s flat screwdriver, but ended up shearing [half of] the thread off. I ended up having to use a nut splitter to remove it - thankfully the slot in the bolt provided just enough holding power for me to put a new nut on.
Milestone
I finished up by hitting everything with WD40 White Lithium grease and while I was tinkering with the door, I hit the screen door with WD40 Silicone. I originally wanted to hit the painted stabilizer bars with some graphite/dry lube to make it super easy to keep sawdust off it (i.e., I would be able to just hit it with some compressed air) but I found that no matter what I used, it removed the paint so for now I’ll just leave it as is.
One thing I did not expect was just how much of a pain it would be to clean out my shop sink from all the grease. Using a combination of directly wiping down the grease with purple degreaser and/or using a magic eraser, I was able to get my shop sink back to a somewhat clean state. I know it’s a shop sink and it’s going to get messy over time, but this was a particularly substantial mess, so I opted to clean it.
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