A trick for dealing with sticky door gibs on those old Otis 211s

I was working on a 211 in a building downtown last month and the gibs on the car door were just not moving right, no matter how much I cleaned them. Instead of taking the whole thing apart, I tried a small amount of dry graphite powder on the gib channel, not the roller, and worked the door back and forth about twenty times. It freed up completely and saved me a couple hours of fighting with it. Has anyone else found a better lube for those old channels?

3 comments

3 Comments

alice_kim1mo ago

Seriously? That's a whole forum post for that?

leo6121mo ago

Some things need the full explanation. Short posts leave out key details. That's why the long form works here.

the_charles27d ago

Nah, hard disagree on this one. Short posts force you to actually think about what matters and cut the fluff. Long posts just let people ramble and bury the actual point somewhere in the fourth paragraph where nobody reads it anyway. Most of the time the key details aren't even key, they're just extra context that makes the post harder to follow. A good writer can explain something clear in a few sentences, and a bad writer can make it a mess in a thousand words.