Disaster for the Greenkeeping Team!

On Sunday morning Alan got a text message from one of our greenkeepers, Ryan, at 6.10am saying that he couldn’t get any machinery out of the workshop, as the main roller-shutter door would not raise up.

After getting there soon after to try and help diagnose the issue and it seemed that the motor was working, but the gears weren’t turning to roll the shutter up - they were just jumping - and the manual override chain had the same issue.

Up the ladders they went to have a quick look at the gearing but it appeared that the issue was internally in the motor so there was nothing we could do, which meant no greens cutting that day and no buggies.

First thing Monday morning we called East Yorkshire Shutters who were very helpful on the phone and they told us someone could be here within the hour, which they were. They quickly found out that the motor needed replacing as the internal gears had sheared, and told me that they could order the motor and install it Tuesday.

So here’s the stressful bit - there was NO way to get any machinery out of the shed until the new motor was fitted. So that means that our team had to begin mowing tees by hand, collect driving range balls by hand (a very long job when you have 20,000 of them), greens weren’t able to be cut for days, rough that was all due to be cut had to be left, etc. Disaster!!

On Tuesday afternoon EY Shutters came with the new motor ready to solve all our problems and permit our lads a sigh of relief as they could get out on the course - but then problem number two arose.

When they dismantled the old motor they found out that the spring inside the 4.2m long tube that rotated to lift the door up, had collapsed. This meant a new motor would be wrecked within weeks if they fitted it.

So the next step was to remove the 200kg+ tube from the door which was approximately 4 metres above the ground (not an easy task!) and take it back to their workshop to see if it could be repaired as a replacement would be approximately a week’s lead time. Things were going from bad to worse.

They took the tube away and an hour later I got a phone call from James at EY Shutters who told us that thankfully the spring could be repaired in the tube and then the full thing reinstalled with the motor - hurrah! So on Wednesday evening EY Shutters came back to the club with the new motor and repaired tube to get us fully back up and running. Phew!

This has not been a fun ordeal and we thank all of our golfers for their patience in the matter, the grass is growing at a very fast rate and we haven’t been able to mow any of it since last week, but we will work very hard to catch up as much as we can now that this is all over.