The Fly Wheel

Our garage door opener hasn't worked well in several years but it creaks up and down. (like my back and neck) I have tried a variety of fixes such as tightening all of the screws, adjusting the motor, tightening the guidewires but none of these solved the problem. Then the motor seemed to be conking out and I thought $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$. So I decided to take the afternoon and get it fixed. I cleaned all of the moving parts, greased, tightened up the bolts that had been violently shaken and inspected thoroughly.
DANG! No improvement. So I opened and closed the garage doors over and over and noticed one flywheel hidden above the garage door stopped turning when the door was half way up. The cable kept moving but the flywheel was frozen. I took it off, inspected it and found that the inside wheel was bent and the bearings were shot. I went to Lowes and bought a new fly wheel for $3.71 and took two minutes to install and the garage door works.

Years of violent opening and closing. The whole system didn't work. It put undue stress on the motor and I am sure that it has torn down the whole system. $3.71 and a few minutes to fix.

I am pretty sure that many, many systems behave in the same way...my back/neck and school systems.