What good is a beautiful set of carriage doors if your have to get out and manually open them? If you like me you would just park outside rather to get out, open the doors, drive in then get out and close the doors. Besides if the wind is blowing they probably won't stay open anyway, right? Well there is simple way to adapt a conventional garage door opener to work with carriage doors.

Bear in mind that there are safety hazards with doing this. I am just showing you what I did! You must do your own research and make sure that you make it safe to operate. Animals and children could be killed by closing garage doors!!

The mechanism to open carriage doors works backwards to a typical garage door opener. With a roll up door it must pull or lift the door to open it. Then it pushes the door closed. With carriage style doors you push the open and pull the closed. While a standard opener will do this it means the safety controls are working backwards.

When the opener is in the open cycle your doors are closing. If you trip the safety mechanism while they are opening they close. This is a serious safety hazard! While the doors are closing the light beams do not operate so there is no safety except the pressure sensors. So this needs to be fixed or your just asking for someone to get hurt or even killed!

I used chain drive openers on mine and the 'fix' was very simple. The carriage, the part that actually attaches to your doors is pushed and pulled by the chain on the opener. I detached the chain and slide the carriage off the end of the track. I then turned it 180 degrees and installed it back on the track. When the opener is in the 'open' mode it is now pushing the doors instead of pulling and all the safety features work just as they are supposed to. Everything works exactly as it did before except that the carriage it attached to the opposite side of the chain. So the load on the motor is the same and should not cause any problems or damage the opener in any way. This may void you warranty however, so keep that in mind.

This is the shows the carriage before the changes.