Car Door Protector From Garage Support Pole

New house, so new basic stuff has to be done. Here's an easy one, takes about10 minutes and $10. When the car door opens, it now hits the rope instead of the metal pole in the garage.

Materials:

1) 3/8ths by 100 foot section of rope, $10 from Home Depot.

2) two pieces of masking tape.

Tools:

screwdriver, knife, a lighter.

this is a basic wrap using a rope/string. the beauty of it is when done properly no ends show and it won't slip. It looks pretty nice, and the 3/8" rope protects the car doors just enough. If you want more, just do a second wrap over the first.

To start, tape one end (the start end) of the rope just to hold it in place at the top place on the pole that you want to wrap

2) tape the rope at the bottom below where you want the wrap to stop. bring the roll of rope back up to where the start end is.

3) while holding the blight on the rope against the pole, wrap the blight around the pole capturing the two up and down runs of rope. This is actually the hardest part of the whole project. Snug up the first wrap of the pole and the second so it pinches and holds the upward run of the rope good and tight against the pole.

4) keep wrapping the pole round and round, nice and neat, packing the wraps neatly as you go, never doubling back on a previous wrap.

when you get to the end of the rope, or you have gone down as far as you like, run the end through the loop (blight) at the bottom of the pole that you made initially. you only want about 2 inches sticking out, so cut the rope. Heat the blade of the knife with the lighter so you actually melt the end of the rope as you cut it, this way it won't fray.

Now come the cool part: take off all the tape, and then pull up on the start end pulling all the slack out of the loop at the bottom. you want to pull this until the bottom loop goes under the bottom wrap. this will pull the end of the rope with it tucked under the wraps in seemingly impossible tuck.

you now have a long tail at the start end at the top. before you cut it off, go over the wrap and make sure everything is nice as snug. When I did this the top first wrap got a little loose so I just went into the middle and using a screwdriver pulled the upward run down a bit to re-snug it back. I then adjusted all the wraps to cover up where is pulled it out, and pulled out some more a little lower so there wouldn't be any bulges. this takes a little finesse. I cut off the tail right at the top (see the picture,) but thinking about it now, I should of cut of off between the 2nd and 3rd or so wrap to completely hide its existence. Again, this was cut with the heated blade.

If you do it this way, and line up were the tuck-in's are, the wrap becomes a real mystery to people as it looks like the the wrap is not a piece of rope with two ends but rather a continuous loop, and really confuses them as they thing there is just a straight run under the wrap from top to bottom.

- JL