At the Ranch, we aren’t ALWAYS working on ranch projects. Sometimes, we need to change our focus and work on something else. One issue that has been a thorn in our side since we bought the Ranch is our old hangar door. The large opening is built with an exterior steel truss above the wood header and on the roof. The purpose of this is to be able to span the 40’ width and support the center of the header and avoid a center post that would obviously be in the way of the airplane.
When we moved in, we knew there were some issues with the door assembly. It was paramount that the door function because the plane needed to get moved as soon as possible from Troutdale. The previous homeowner didn’t have an airplane and had never needed to have a fully functioning door. In fact, to avoid having to figure it out, the previous owner gave us $5,000 to make this problem ours. Greg spent a full day dealing with it and figured out how to get it working again. The way they work is we basically have (2) 20’ wide manual garage doors that share a movable center rail post. When the doors are up, the center vertical rail rolls out of the way on a horizontal track. This center rail has been our nemesis.
The vertical height of the center rail isn’t forgiving and must be the exact difference between the top connection at the header and the concrete slab connection. There is ¼” variance allowed over 12’. Over time, the header beam has gotten rotten where it is supported by a rod that penetrates the roof (slow roof leak) and connects to the steel truss. The rod used to hold the header up by a small plate washer and nut that were indenting the header and allowing the header and vertical rail to drop. When we bought the house, Greg jacked the header up to level, added two large pieces of steel to act as a 9” square washer and adjusted the nuts. He then cut the vertical rail down to match the new adjusted height. Over the last 5 years, the header continued to drop ever so slightly until we could no longer position the vertical rail. We knew we could cut the vertical rail down again, but that wasn’t the root of the problem, and we obviously can’t add more length to the rail after we have cut it. Therefore, the hangar doors have been open to the elements since last summer waiting to be fixed. The hanger gets really dirty and attracts every leaf from our nearby trees. This has been quite annoying.
Finally, last week, we made the repair and the doors are now closed.
For this repair to happen, we had a friend fabricate an 8-foot-long upside-down truss similar to the one above the roof, but this would hang only 18” inches down into the hangar. Thankfully, we are not tight on height clearance, so that is no issue.
To make this happen, we installed two temporary post shores (adjustable steel supports) to hold the header beam up while we removed the supporting rod. We then installed a new and longer supporting rod through the roof truss, roof, wood header and through the new upside-down 18” deep bottom truss that was supported by a scissor lift. We then tightened everything and sucked it all in tight to match our horizontal string line. The actual fabrication, preparation, and installation required a few days of effort, and we are very happy to have this repair behind us. Greg then moved on to more Ranch work. A special shout out Dan and Matt Butkovich for helping in this repair!
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