Posted August 14th, 2020 at 5:33 pm by Dan Musick
In the garage door industry, we distinguish between “openers” for residential applications and “operators” for commercial and industrial applications.
Back in the early eighties, I worked for Northwest Door in Elgin, Illinois. While there, I got to know a gentleman who had formerly worked for John Greene Corporation in Downers Grove, Illinois. They were the primary distributor of PowerMaster operators in the Midwest. This gentleman was designing an operator to compete with PowerMaster. He chose the name “Link” for the brand, and from there, they designed and produced the line of Link Operators.
At the time Liftmaster, a division of Chamberlain, sold only residential openers. Professional installers installed the better LiftMaster openers, and homeowners picked up less expensive Chamberlain brand openers at their local DIY centers. Chamberlain also marketed residential openers through Sears and other home centers such as True Value.
In the early nineties, LiftMaster purchased Link Door Controls and initially changed the stickers on the original gray Link operators.
Before selling Link to LiftMaster they had started painting the operators black.
New LiftMaster Design
Since the early nineties, LiftMaster has redesigned the circuits as well as the cover so now the operators are a more attractive red and black.
Several years ago, during one of our live training seminars, we installed a jackshaft operator. On a separate occasion, we tested different spring systems using a commercial LiftMaster jackshaft operator. In order to quickly run up the cycles on springs, we added a timer to keep the operator running continuously. We did have to lubricate the operator every few days. You can see here that we’ve almost reached the 200,000 cycle mark, and the operator still runs fine.
LiftMaster Operators are superb, as this video further explains.
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