Tutorials & FAQs · 25:19
GRIT Gate Control Installation
Complete installation guide for GRIT automated blast gate controls — mounting, wiring, and initial setup.
What this video covers
Complete installation guide for GRIT automated blast gate controls — mounting, wiring, and initial setup.
Published 2023-10-20. Runtime: 25:19.
Continue with GRIT
Use the related Solution page for product options, retrofit details, and the next step for your shop.
Video guide
Key points and full transcript
Scan the main points and chapter list, or open the complete transcript below.
Key takeaways
- Start with a freely moving metal blast gate and prepare the slide so the actuator does not fight burrs, friction, or a stop bolt.
- Use the supplied guides and brackets to keep the rod, bearing arm, and gate slide aligned before tightening the hardware.
- Power and bind the Gate Control before attaching the actuator arm, then calibrate open and closed positions without leaving the servo under stress.
Chapters
- Compatible blast gates and installation kit
- Prepare and lubricate the gate slide
- Drill the mounting holes
- Install and align the rod brackets
- Attach the tab and slide brackets
- Power and bind the Gate Control
- Center the actuator and attach the arm
- Calibrate open and closed positions
- Installation recap
Read the full transcript41 timecoded passages
This machine-generated transcript was reviewed and lightly edited for product names, technical terms, and readability.
Hi, I'm Marco Unieto with GRIT Automation and today I wanted to show you the GRIT Gate Control System and how to install it and how to calibrate your arm properly during that installation. To begin with, the GRIT Gate Control retrofits onto metal blast gates. There's a variety of different brands out there, but the key is that they're a free moving metal blast gate. There's ones out there that they're developing now that have some locking mechanisms but it's all manual and our system won't really work on those.
So you're better off just finding the inexpensive metal blast gate and we retrofit right onto that. So this kit comes with tools to help you install the device on your metal blast gate. We have a couple different screwdrivers, a nut driver, a drill bit for drilling holes in the tab of the blast gate along with the other parts that I'll go into a little more detail as we move along. Before we get started with installing the GRIT actuator onto the blast gate, we want to start with doing some prep work to it to ensure the best results.
The larger the gate is, the more important it is to do this prep work. On a small two inch like this, two and a half inch, it slides pretty easily and the prep work doesn't always need to be done, but we suggest you do to ensure, again, the best results possible. So to start with, we've got our pull tab right here and we're going to take this slide out by removing the screws and opening up the body of the blast gate. So I'm just going to take a screwdriver, screw gun here and remove all six screws.
Now on some units they won't have threaded bodies but they'll have a nut and bolt going through the housing and it'll be a little different but the approach is all the same. So we'll make sure we save all of our screws here and now I have the gate body taken apart and the slide taken apart. Now the first thing I'm going to do is to prep the slide and to do that, I'm going to use a file or sandpaper or something along those lines. I like to use a 120, maybe 220 sandpaper and we're going to sand off the corners,
any sharp edges. You can rub your fingers over the edges and you can feel little burrs and some sharpness to it. So the goal is to remove all that and make it slide as smoothly as possible in the gate body. So I'm just going to work the edges here and it's not rocket science, you know, just be careful as you go and I'm going to make sure I get these corners and make sure everything is nice and smooth and I know that I've probably done a good job when I can take my thumb or
finger and rub it along there and it just feels nice and glassy smooth and I think I've accomplished that here. So the slide is prepped, while I've got this open I'm going to just do a visual inspection, make sure there's no manufacturing defects, anything like that and, you know, this looks pretty good and if you want to take this one step further, we spray the insides with a silicone lubricant that really helps the sliding. It'll dry up enough that it's not going to gum up with dust unless you run your collector
immediately after with a lot of dust into the gate body. Make sure I get the slides and in fact the face, it can't hurt to do the face also and I just know that the entire inside of the body is lubricated well and this sort of soaks into the metal and creates a better environment for the slide to operate. So that's lubricated, we've got the slide guide sanded down and we can put it back together. So another element that's important, I'll show you on this four inch, is that the stop
nut here or the stop bolt, it's important to remove that. What can happen is throughout time, your gate's going to vibrate a bit and this sometimes can work its way in and cause friction on your gate, end of the day this isn't needed at all, especially once you're putting the GRIT Gate Control on. So make sure you remove it completely and it's gone. So next I'm going to put the screws back in place and tighten up the body. You don't need to put in these two right here and we ensure that it's sliding nice
and you can see how nice this slides after I did that. I can feel the difference from the prep work that I've done on it. Alright so now that we have that part done, we've prepped the gate, we're going to move on to actually installing the gate actuator. To begin with, we're going to grab the drill guide and if you have multiple gates, you only want to use these once. They're made out of plastic. Once you send a drill bit in here, you're going to wallow out that hole a little bit
and it will cause an error if you try to use this on another gate. So only use it once. You're going to slide it over the tab and you can usually just eyeball it center and we're going to take our drill bit that we provide and I'm going to make sure it's nice and centered on that tab and I'm going to drill my first hole. Alright so I've got my first hole. Now before I drill my second hole, I'm going to take this bit.
You can use a little screw, a nail, anything like that but I'm going to stick it through the hole I drilled in the slide guide to ensure the alignment is proper. So I've got that in there holding my slide guide in place and now I'm going to drill my second hole. You can pull that out and then you can see we've got our two nice holes ready to go. One thing you want to check is on the back side after you've drilled these holes, there might be some burrs. It's important to try to knock those off.
You can do it with a file, maybe take your bit from the opposite side and see if that'll knock them off, some sandpaper, whatever works for you. We've drilled the holes now in our tab and we can now move on to the next step. I'm going to move on to the 4 inch gate which is probably the most common gate people have and we already have our holes drilled here and the process is the same for every gate. The only things you'll find is once we move to a 7 inch gate we just use some more robust
parts but the installation and process is exactly the same. Here again we've got our holes drilled in our tab and we've got our screws back in place and the body secured and things have been prepped and it's moving nice and free. We can see that. This body also has threaded holes going through the body. You're going to take the rod bracket and stick one of our screws through it and we're going to mount these to the underside and I'm going to send these screws all the way through and
pretty much I'd call it hand tight. You don't want to crank down 100% of the way but 80% of the way, make sure that they're rigid as they've installed because we're going to move them just a little bit as we proceed to the next steps. We've got the first rod bracket so these things can move. In this installation with the threaded inserts I'm going to take my rod and I'm going to stick it through and what this does is this now aligns the two rod brackets so they're
in line with each other and what you can do, I'll do it this way, is I'm going to slide it all the way this way and tighten that back one down all the way. In this gate I can actually push this rod back it through. If it doesn't work for you on some other model gates meaning that this butts into the collar of the gate body then you can, right now I would just tighten this down but if you can't push it through then just know that you've had this thing more or less secure, it's not
super loose but you can take this out and then tighten it down all the way. You'll be able to move these slightly when the time comes to put this in and put the set screws down. So you can see this is still fitting in no problem. Now I'm going to turn the gate over and you can see we have the mounting screws showing themselves there and we're just going to put the gate body onto it so it just should fit nice and easily especially on a gate body like this.
You might find you have to do a slightly different order of operations if you're dealing with a loose bolt nut meaning that you might slide the bottom nut and the body is still loose because the holes not threaded and it wasn't able to bring all this tight. So in that case it's a similar thing that you just will get your body on and get your nuts on the bolts there and then you can go through the same process of aligning your rod brackets here.
So now we can tighten, I'm just going to use a pair of pliers, you can use a ratchet, a crescent wrench, whatever works for you and just give these guys a good tightening down and just like anything you don't want to go crazy tightening down. Our components are primarily made out of plastic here so you can damage them if you use all of your muscle or you know if you use a drill too much you could possibly break through and drive screws through the body, you don't want to do that.
So we just make sure they're nice and snug, that's good, everything's still operating fine, we've got our gate body attached and now we're ready to go on to the next step and that's going to be putting on the tab bracket. We've got our holes drilled and we're going to slide the tab bracket on and what I'm going to do is I'm going to look at it and make sure I've got my holes aligned so when I come back to attach the next part I know that the screws are going to make it through to the hole there.
So all we're doing is friction fitting the tab bracket onto the tab at this point. So the next step is we're going to take the slide bracket which has a connection bracket in the bearing arm, it should come assembled like this to you and we're just going to slide that over your rod and it should line up, there are grooves that line up and sort of interlock the two pieces together and again we're going to start by trying to get our two screws through the connection bracket into the tab bracket and through the tab and
basically sandwiching all these pieces together and holding them snug. Take a drill or a screwdriver and I'm not going to do it super tight, I'm just going to get them in most of the way so it's holding in place, we'll worry about snugging them down at the very end. So those are in place now, now this is all connected and we can see things are still sliding smoothly but what we want to do is dial it in with these two screws and these two screws allow us to adjust the height, the small bits of height and our left to right.
So next what I'm going to do is I'm going to make sure that the bearing arm is parallel to the gate body and the slide, we don't want this arm racked one way or the other. So I'm just going to visually look at it and make a small adjustment and sometimes you can tell I've got this just a little snug so it's not allowing me to move it very easily. I'm just going to loosen those two screws up that I just put in and it's going to allow
me to move this up and down and create that parallelness that I need. So I'm just going to look at it and I think that looks good and now I'll tighten those two down and then the next step is the other two screws which is our left to right. The best way to do that is pull your gate out all the way and wiggle it left and right and you're going to see the difference as those screws slide in the slot of this connection bracket and go left
and right and then pick the spot in the middle of that and secure those two screws down. And again I'm using a drill here but you can easily just do this by hand, make sure you don't use too much force driving these screws down into these components here. So now that we have all this and we're happy where this rod bracket is, on this particular model the rod bracket supplied is just the right length. Other models you might have a little extra
that you might want to push back. So for example you might have a gate that sticks out a bit. You can leave it or you can push it back. I like to push it back to a spot that allows the bearing arm to open up all the way and I know visually that as I'm calibrating it once it reaches here I know it's open and I really don't have to worry about if I'm putting the arm under strain, if I'm going too far or something like that. So now that
I have my bearing arm where I want it and everything's in alignment I'm going to tighten the two set screws on the back to make sure the rod is nice and secure. And again this is something you just want to snug up, you don't need to crank down on it and this guy is not going anywhere. So now we've got it sliding no problem and that's most of the installation of the gate control. The last thing we're going to do is attach the arm. Now before attaching the arm you want to have your gate installed and powered and all gates
are going to be powered by the GRIT Power Bank. We also have, you're going to have a wire that plugs into your gate. We have a little green connector that goes into the gate here and what you're able to do is to daisy-chain, meaning going from one gate to the next with power. And you can see that the gate is lighting up now for the first time and before we can attach this arm you are going to bind your Gate Control device to your Hub. You can tell that the gate is flashing red and green; that is common of
any GRIT device. The LED will flash red and green when that device has not been bound to the system, and you'll need to do that before proceeding any further. If you don't know what binding is, look in the GRIT manual and it will tell you step by step how to do it. It's a very simple process. Now that you see your device is solid red—it could be green also—it's telling you that it is bound to the system and is ready to be calibrated.
So I'm going to go into the GRIT App, and if you go under Devices and under Gate, you will see a line that says Gate with a hyphen and then some miscellaneous letters and numbers. To determine whether that is your gate, you can press the Find icon on that line and it will flash red and green to let you know that you're approaching the right gate. When you first are on the system, you might have six, seven, or more gates on a system and you want to know which one you're actually working on, and the initial populated names
are a little confusing because they're random letters and numbers. So now that I've found the gate that I want to work with I'm going to go into that while I'm in the app and then I can rename it and I'll just call this test gate. I'm going to calibrate it by pressing the calibrate button and I'm going to, it automatically moves to center but you can ensure it moves to center by just pressing the move to center button on the calibration page in the app and what that means is now you can move your gate into a position that's
more or less halfway open. So we're in the middle position, this is in the middle position and now we're ready to put our arm on. So we'll start by taking the top hat and flat off our tab here and I'm going to make sure that we're still more or less halfway open. Now I can take the gate arm, I'm going to put it over the post and try to connect it to the servo. Now the tines on the servo here are going to make you have to either open
or close the gate a little bit to get it to fall down and lock itself securely into place. So actually I just got it there, it still looks good, still in a middle position but if your gate actually has to move a little bit open or closed that's fine as long as you're more or less in that range while getting the arm on. And I can take our mounting screw put that on and tighten it by hand or be careful using a drill. We're just going to snug that
down and then we're going to put our hat washer back on along with some other filler washers. And when doing this because gates all differ a bit in terms of their tab height and slight variations you might find that you need to stack your hat washer and flats slightly different. That's why we give you a variety of different sizes. So if you need to stack a little bit more underneath so that this is riding a planer to the gate body and the slide you'll figure
that out as you do the install. So we've put our top nut on here and now everything here is secure. Next what we're going to do is while we're still in this calibration page we're going to send the gate to open. It just moved just a little bit and now we just keep pressing more open on the calibration page until it is in the final position that we want for being open. Now you can't press really fast on the button to make it move smoothly.
You have to be a little bit patient. Just tap it once, tap it again. You're going to go until you're open. Now if you're retrofitting and you have duct work on your gate already you're going to have to do it by looking at the gate and seeing if the arm is stressed. If I don't know exactly where open is and I'm not wanting to strain this before I give it power I can position it so that I know this slide arm is when it's in the right position
is right there versus if I had the rod out more like that you could do that but you might want to put a piece of tape on here or something and that will give you a visual indicator as to what the maximum open is versus keeping on hitting open and putting a lot of stress on the arm and servo which can damage the system. So we make sure that things are in the right position. The very end of this rod meets up with the bearing arm here so
I know even if I had duct work on here and I couldn't see the slide in here that I know this is my fully open position. So I'll power it back on and go back to my calibration. The gate calibration page has a power graph. While you open or close your gate you should see a spike in power meaning the actuator is working at that time and it's showing you the amperage draw. At a resting state if you keep seeing spikes that means that the system
is under stress and you need to back off your open or your close to prevent your servo from burning out. So in this case I feel that I've gotten the right open position. Now I'm going to hit close and we're not closed all the way so I'll just keep hitting closed just little by little, a little patience. And as you're doing this you know you just keep looking at it and see when it stops wanting to slide in. And there it felt like I could hear it.
There's all sorts of indicators that you'll find depending on your scenario. And because I felt like that last one I put in it felt like it really pushed it in there. I'm going to back it off one just to make sure I'm not putting a lot of strain on the motor here. So now I can open, close, open, close. I'll do that a few times to make sure everything is operating nice and smoothly and that seems to be the case. So the key points to take
away from the installation of the gate actuator and the gate arm is to start with prepping your gate. Make sure that it's operating smoothly. Do some sanding, take it apart. If you can put some silicone lubricant or perhaps some graphite, something like that that helps enhance the sliding of the slide here. That's a major point. Your installation of the gate body, you'll have two different scenarios. One you have a threaded body and the other you don't and they'll just be a slight variation in how you connect it. But the major thing is
do not attach your gate arm until you've bound your gate actuator to the system and then you go through the calibration process. It's extremely important and that will prevent any damage to your system. I'm Marco Unieto with GRIT Automation. Thank you for watching and have a great day.
Tutorials & FAQs · 25:19
GRIT Gate Control Installation
Complete installation guide for GRIT automated blast gate controls — mounting, wiring, and initial setup.
What this video covers
Complete installation guide for GRIT automated blast gate controls — mounting, wiring, and initial setup.
Published 2023-10-20. Runtime: 25:19.
Continue with GRIT
Use the related Solution page for product options, retrofit details, and the next step for your shop.
Video guide
Key points and full transcript
Scan the main points and chapter list, or open the complete transcript below.
Key takeaways
- Start with a freely moving metal blast gate and prepare the slide so the actuator does not fight burrs, friction, or a stop bolt.
- Use the supplied guides and brackets to keep the rod, bearing arm, and gate slide aligned before tightening the hardware.
- Power and bind the Gate Control before attaching the actuator arm, then calibrate open and closed positions without leaving the servo under stress.
Chapters
- Compatible blast gates and installation kit
- Prepare and lubricate the gate slide
- Drill the mounting holes
- Install and align the rod brackets
- Attach the tab and slide brackets
- Power and bind the Gate Control
- Center the actuator and attach the arm
- Calibrate open and closed positions
- Installation recap
Read the full transcript41 timecoded passages
This machine-generated transcript was reviewed and lightly edited for product names, technical terms, and readability.
Hi, I'm Marco Unieto with GRIT Automation and today I wanted to show you the GRIT Gate Control System and how to install it and how to calibrate your arm properly during that installation. To begin with, the GRIT Gate Control retrofits onto metal blast gates. There's a variety of different brands out there, but the key is that they're a free moving metal blast gate. There's ones out there that they're developing now that have some locking mechanisms but it's all manual and our system won't really work on those.
So you're better off just finding the inexpensive metal blast gate and we retrofit right onto that. So this kit comes with tools to help you install the device on your metal blast gate. We have a couple different screwdrivers, a nut driver, a drill bit for drilling holes in the tab of the blast gate along with the other parts that I'll go into a little more detail as we move along. Before we get started with installing the GRIT actuator onto the blast gate, we want to start with doing some prep work to it to ensure the best results.
The larger the gate is, the more important it is to do this prep work. On a small two inch like this, two and a half inch, it slides pretty easily and the prep work doesn't always need to be done, but we suggest you do to ensure, again, the best results possible. So to start with, we've got our pull tab right here and we're going to take this slide out by removing the screws and opening up the body of the blast gate. So I'm just going to take a screwdriver, screw gun here and remove all six screws.
Now on some units they won't have threaded bodies but they'll have a nut and bolt going through the housing and it'll be a little different but the approach is all the same. So we'll make sure we save all of our screws here and now I have the gate body taken apart and the slide taken apart. Now the first thing I'm going to do is to prep the slide and to do that, I'm going to use a file or sandpaper or something along those lines. I like to use a 120, maybe 220 sandpaper and we're going to sand off the corners,
any sharp edges. You can rub your fingers over the edges and you can feel little burrs and some sharpness to it. So the goal is to remove all that and make it slide as smoothly as possible in the gate body. So I'm just going to work the edges here and it's not rocket science, you know, just be careful as you go and I'm going to make sure I get these corners and make sure everything is nice and smooth and I know that I've probably done a good job when I can take my thumb or
finger and rub it along there and it just feels nice and glassy smooth and I think I've accomplished that here. So the slide is prepped, while I've got this open I'm going to just do a visual inspection, make sure there's no manufacturing defects, anything like that and, you know, this looks pretty good and if you want to take this one step further, we spray the insides with a silicone lubricant that really helps the sliding. It'll dry up enough that it's not going to gum up with dust unless you run your collector
immediately after with a lot of dust into the gate body. Make sure I get the slides and in fact the face, it can't hurt to do the face also and I just know that the entire inside of the body is lubricated well and this sort of soaks into the metal and creates a better environment for the slide to operate. So that's lubricated, we've got the slide guide sanded down and we can put it back together. So another element that's important, I'll show you on this four inch, is that the stop
nut here or the stop bolt, it's important to remove that. What can happen is throughout time, your gate's going to vibrate a bit and this sometimes can work its way in and cause friction on your gate, end of the day this isn't needed at all, especially once you're putting the GRIT Gate Control on. So make sure you remove it completely and it's gone. So next I'm going to put the screws back in place and tighten up the body. You don't need to put in these two right here and we ensure that it's sliding nice
and you can see how nice this slides after I did that. I can feel the difference from the prep work that I've done on it. Alright so now that we have that part done, we've prepped the gate, we're going to move on to actually installing the gate actuator. To begin with, we're going to grab the drill guide and if you have multiple gates, you only want to use these once. They're made out of plastic. Once you send a drill bit in here, you're going to wallow out that hole a little bit
and it will cause an error if you try to use this on another gate. So only use it once. You're going to slide it over the tab and you can usually just eyeball it center and we're going to take our drill bit that we provide and I'm going to make sure it's nice and centered on that tab and I'm going to drill my first hole. Alright so I've got my first hole. Now before I drill my second hole, I'm going to take this bit.
You can use a little screw, a nail, anything like that but I'm going to stick it through the hole I drilled in the slide guide to ensure the alignment is proper. So I've got that in there holding my slide guide in place and now I'm going to drill my second hole. You can pull that out and then you can see we've got our two nice holes ready to go. One thing you want to check is on the back side after you've drilled these holes, there might be some burrs. It's important to try to knock those off.
You can do it with a file, maybe take your bit from the opposite side and see if that'll knock them off, some sandpaper, whatever works for you. We've drilled the holes now in our tab and we can now move on to the next step. I'm going to move on to the 4 inch gate which is probably the most common gate people have and we already have our holes drilled here and the process is the same for every gate. The only things you'll find is once we move to a 7 inch gate we just use some more robust
parts but the installation and process is exactly the same. Here again we've got our holes drilled in our tab and we've got our screws back in place and the body secured and things have been prepped and it's moving nice and free. We can see that. This body also has threaded holes going through the body. You're going to take the rod bracket and stick one of our screws through it and we're going to mount these to the underside and I'm going to send these screws all the way through and
pretty much I'd call it hand tight. You don't want to crank down 100% of the way but 80% of the way, make sure that they're rigid as they've installed because we're going to move them just a little bit as we proceed to the next steps. We've got the first rod bracket so these things can move. In this installation with the threaded inserts I'm going to take my rod and I'm going to stick it through and what this does is this now aligns the two rod brackets so they're
in line with each other and what you can do, I'll do it this way, is I'm going to slide it all the way this way and tighten that back one down all the way. In this gate I can actually push this rod back it through. If it doesn't work for you on some other model gates meaning that this butts into the collar of the gate body then you can, right now I would just tighten this down but if you can't push it through then just know that you've had this thing more or less secure, it's not
super loose but you can take this out and then tighten it down all the way. You'll be able to move these slightly when the time comes to put this in and put the set screws down. So you can see this is still fitting in no problem. Now I'm going to turn the gate over and you can see we have the mounting screws showing themselves there and we're just going to put the gate body onto it so it just should fit nice and easily especially on a gate body like this.
You might find you have to do a slightly different order of operations if you're dealing with a loose bolt nut meaning that you might slide the bottom nut and the body is still loose because the holes not threaded and it wasn't able to bring all this tight. So in that case it's a similar thing that you just will get your body on and get your nuts on the bolts there and then you can go through the same process of aligning your rod brackets here.
So now we can tighten, I'm just going to use a pair of pliers, you can use a ratchet, a crescent wrench, whatever works for you and just give these guys a good tightening down and just like anything you don't want to go crazy tightening down. Our components are primarily made out of plastic here so you can damage them if you use all of your muscle or you know if you use a drill too much you could possibly break through and drive screws through the body, you don't want to do that.
So we just make sure they're nice and snug, that's good, everything's still operating fine, we've got our gate body attached and now we're ready to go on to the next step and that's going to be putting on the tab bracket. We've got our holes drilled and we're going to slide the tab bracket on and what I'm going to do is I'm going to look at it and make sure I've got my holes aligned so when I come back to attach the next part I know that the screws are going to make it through to the hole there.
So all we're doing is friction fitting the tab bracket onto the tab at this point. So the next step is we're going to take the slide bracket which has a connection bracket in the bearing arm, it should come assembled like this to you and we're just going to slide that over your rod and it should line up, there are grooves that line up and sort of interlock the two pieces together and again we're going to start by trying to get our two screws through the connection bracket into the tab bracket and through the tab and
basically sandwiching all these pieces together and holding them snug. Take a drill or a screwdriver and I'm not going to do it super tight, I'm just going to get them in most of the way so it's holding in place, we'll worry about snugging them down at the very end. So those are in place now, now this is all connected and we can see things are still sliding smoothly but what we want to do is dial it in with these two screws and these two screws allow us to adjust the height, the small bits of height and our left to right.
So next what I'm going to do is I'm going to make sure that the bearing arm is parallel to the gate body and the slide, we don't want this arm racked one way or the other. So I'm just going to visually look at it and make a small adjustment and sometimes you can tell I've got this just a little snug so it's not allowing me to move it very easily. I'm just going to loosen those two screws up that I just put in and it's going to allow
me to move this up and down and create that parallelness that I need. So I'm just going to look at it and I think that looks good and now I'll tighten those two down and then the next step is the other two screws which is our left to right. The best way to do that is pull your gate out all the way and wiggle it left and right and you're going to see the difference as those screws slide in the slot of this connection bracket and go left
and right and then pick the spot in the middle of that and secure those two screws down. And again I'm using a drill here but you can easily just do this by hand, make sure you don't use too much force driving these screws down into these components here. So now that we have all this and we're happy where this rod bracket is, on this particular model the rod bracket supplied is just the right length. Other models you might have a little extra
that you might want to push back. So for example you might have a gate that sticks out a bit. You can leave it or you can push it back. I like to push it back to a spot that allows the bearing arm to open up all the way and I know visually that as I'm calibrating it once it reaches here I know it's open and I really don't have to worry about if I'm putting the arm under strain, if I'm going too far or something like that. So now that
I have my bearing arm where I want it and everything's in alignment I'm going to tighten the two set screws on the back to make sure the rod is nice and secure. And again this is something you just want to snug up, you don't need to crank down on it and this guy is not going anywhere. So now we've got it sliding no problem and that's most of the installation of the gate control. The last thing we're going to do is attach the arm. Now before attaching the arm you want to have your gate installed and powered and all gates
are going to be powered by the GRIT Power Bank. We also have, you're going to have a wire that plugs into your gate. We have a little green connector that goes into the gate here and what you're able to do is to daisy-chain, meaning going from one gate to the next with power. And you can see that the gate is lighting up now for the first time and before we can attach this arm you are going to bind your Gate Control device to your Hub. You can tell that the gate is flashing red and green; that is common of
any GRIT device. The LED will flash red and green when that device has not been bound to the system, and you'll need to do that before proceeding any further. If you don't know what binding is, look in the GRIT manual and it will tell you step by step how to do it. It's a very simple process. Now that you see your device is solid red—it could be green also—it's telling you that it is bound to the system and is ready to be calibrated.
So I'm going to go into the GRIT App, and if you go under Devices and under Gate, you will see a line that says Gate with a hyphen and then some miscellaneous letters and numbers. To determine whether that is your gate, you can press the Find icon on that line and it will flash red and green to let you know that you're approaching the right gate. When you first are on the system, you might have six, seven, or more gates on a system and you want to know which one you're actually working on, and the initial populated names
are a little confusing because they're random letters and numbers. So now that I've found the gate that I want to work with I'm going to go into that while I'm in the app and then I can rename it and I'll just call this test gate. I'm going to calibrate it by pressing the calibrate button and I'm going to, it automatically moves to center but you can ensure it moves to center by just pressing the move to center button on the calibration page in the app and what that means is now you can move your gate into a position that's
more or less halfway open. So we're in the middle position, this is in the middle position and now we're ready to put our arm on. So we'll start by taking the top hat and flat off our tab here and I'm going to make sure that we're still more or less halfway open. Now I can take the gate arm, I'm going to put it over the post and try to connect it to the servo. Now the tines on the servo here are going to make you have to either open
or close the gate a little bit to get it to fall down and lock itself securely into place. So actually I just got it there, it still looks good, still in a middle position but if your gate actually has to move a little bit open or closed that's fine as long as you're more or less in that range while getting the arm on. And I can take our mounting screw put that on and tighten it by hand or be careful using a drill. We're just going to snug that
down and then we're going to put our hat washer back on along with some other filler washers. And when doing this because gates all differ a bit in terms of their tab height and slight variations you might find that you need to stack your hat washer and flats slightly different. That's why we give you a variety of different sizes. So if you need to stack a little bit more underneath so that this is riding a planer to the gate body and the slide you'll figure
that out as you do the install. So we've put our top nut on here and now everything here is secure. Next what we're going to do is while we're still in this calibration page we're going to send the gate to open. It just moved just a little bit and now we just keep pressing more open on the calibration page until it is in the final position that we want for being open. Now you can't press really fast on the button to make it move smoothly.
You have to be a little bit patient. Just tap it once, tap it again. You're going to go until you're open. Now if you're retrofitting and you have duct work on your gate already you're going to have to do it by looking at the gate and seeing if the arm is stressed. If I don't know exactly where open is and I'm not wanting to strain this before I give it power I can position it so that I know this slide arm is when it's in the right position
is right there versus if I had the rod out more like that you could do that but you might want to put a piece of tape on here or something and that will give you a visual indicator as to what the maximum open is versus keeping on hitting open and putting a lot of stress on the arm and servo which can damage the system. So we make sure that things are in the right position. The very end of this rod meets up with the bearing arm here so
I know even if I had duct work on here and I couldn't see the slide in here that I know this is my fully open position. So I'll power it back on and go back to my calibration. The gate calibration page has a power graph. While you open or close your gate you should see a spike in power meaning the actuator is working at that time and it's showing you the amperage draw. At a resting state if you keep seeing spikes that means that the system
is under stress and you need to back off your open or your close to prevent your servo from burning out. So in this case I feel that I've gotten the right open position. Now I'm going to hit close and we're not closed all the way so I'll just keep hitting closed just little by little, a little patience. And as you're doing this you know you just keep looking at it and see when it stops wanting to slide in. And there it felt like I could hear it.
There's all sorts of indicators that you'll find depending on your scenario. And because I felt like that last one I put in it felt like it really pushed it in there. I'm going to back it off one just to make sure I'm not putting a lot of strain on the motor here. So now I can open, close, open, close. I'll do that a few times to make sure everything is operating nice and smoothly and that seems to be the case. So the key points to take
away from the installation of the gate actuator and the gate arm is to start with prepping your gate. Make sure that it's operating smoothly. Do some sanding, take it apart. If you can put some silicone lubricant or perhaps some graphite, something like that that helps enhance the sliding of the slide here. That's a major point. Your installation of the gate body, you'll have two different scenarios. One you have a threaded body and the other you don't and they'll just be a slight variation in how you connect it. But the major thing is
do not attach your gate arm until you've bound your gate actuator to the system and then you go through the calibration process. It's extremely important and that will prevent any damage to your system. I'm Marco Unieto with GRIT Automation. Thank you for watching and have a great day.