Garage Door Opener
 

Any of you guys had any luck shortening a belt drive garage door opener?

My brother and I was going to install one at my mom's place last Saturday but the Genie unit he bought was 123 inches long. The Craftsman chain drive we took out is only 107 inches long. The opener cannot be any longer because the main beam in the house runs thru the area directly behind the opener motor. I'm guessing someone shortened the chain drive unit to get it to fit.

I saw what looks like a coupler for the belt on the new unit but he called Genie on Saturday and they said it couldn't be shortened. I looked online at a couple of sites that mentioned a belt drive can be shortened but it was more involved than shortening a screw drive. No details were given about how to accomplish it.

He ordered it online and can return it but we thought if we could shorten it and have it work ok, we would like to install it.

Nadda.
Guess we'll go to Plan B.

Mount it below the beam if enough head room , does not have hang straight .

Side mount type is the best option.

No headroom. There's a low overhead door track on it now. The old opener just cleared the door as it was.

can you mount the head unit off to the side and put another pulley in to make the turn?

Didn't really want to re-engineer the thing. I guest that could be done.
Was really interested if the track could be shortened though.

thanks for the responses though.

Can the old opener be fixed ?

I don't know. It's probably 20+ years old.

It still worked but the new unit was bought since the old one was not reliable. It would lose it's memory when the power went out (sometimes).
It's for my 92 year old mother and she can't reset the unit by herself when it loses the code. We want to replace it for her (and our) peace of mind.

My son had the same problem.
He and his father in law cut a nice round hole in the beam and passed the operator door thru it. The operator motor is on the back side of the beam.

Sadly the door opener motor will end up right smack in the middle of the main beam for the house and would require me to cut out an area big enough for the motor head.

That won't happen.

I talked to my brother last night and suggested he call Genie again to see if he can get a better answer. After searching last night I saw a review on Home Depot where a guy stated that he called Genie about his belt drive opener(different model) and they sent him a drawing outlining the directions for cutting the unit down. Hopefully Genie is not located on the east coast.

We couldn't get an answer from Genie so today we shortened it.
We moved the garage door end mount further out than it was with the chain drive and shortened the track 12-1/2 inches. We shortened the belt by 25 inches and it worked out great.

The piece we thought as being the belt coupler turned out to be just that. It had three screws holding it together. Took it apart, cut the belt and reassembled. FYI the belt has metal wires reinforcing it so we had to cut it with a hacksaw.

Thought I'd post this for anyone else doing a search.