Just before we left for the summer, I finished building my driveway entrance gate, complete with solar powered automatic opener. A month or so before we returned home, Marc told me that the gate had stopped working, and that he disconnected the actuator, effectively making it a manual gate. Fixing whatever went wrong was the priority yesterday.
Armed with some tools, a volt meter, and the cell phone, I went out to the gate, and checked a few obvious things like battery voltage, loose connections, etc. Finding nothing wrong, I called G.T.O. (gates that open), and spoke with their tech department. They walked me through a bunch of tests, and the conclusion was that the circuit board had crashed. Yep, even gate openers have circuit boards. If the terrorists would ever come up with a way to disable all of these electronic gizmos, they would easily win the war on terror, without ever firing a shot.
The good news is that there's a 1 year warranty on parts & labor. I packaged up the defective circuit board, and mailed it off to Florida, where it will either get fixed, or replaced. In the meantime, half of the gate will stay open. OK, moving on to the next project........
I moved the truck, the two trailers, the tractor, and Marc & Chandra's boat out of the garage. Cleaning the floor of dead bugs, and other debris was the next task. Thank goodness for shop vacs, and their ability to suck up just about everything. When I was finished with that I moved the tractor back inside, and did some routine maintenance. This might sound a bit weird to some folks, but putting a coat of wax on some of that bright orange paint made perfectly good sense to me. Since it sits outside for about half of the year, protecting the paint is kind of a no brainer. Hey, I can't help it, I like shiny things!
No comments:
Post a Comment