Spring Repair for Lombard's Older Garage Doors

Why This Fails Locally

Most of the housing in this service area went up between 1938 and 1998, with the median build year sitting around 1973. That's a window when torsion springs were sized for lighter doors and thinner insulation packages than what's often hung on those same openers today. A door built in that era, still running its original hardware, is carrying more weight-cycles than the spring was rated for decades ago, and metal fatigues the same way everywhere once it crosses that line.

The climate band here is cold and moderate, which matters more than people think. Steel springs lose a little flexibility every winter, and the daily swing between a heated garage and a frozen driveway puts stress on the coil at the exact point where it's already thinnest from age. That's why January and February calls spike for the same fault: a spring that's been winding down slowly since the Carter administration finally lets go on a cold morning.

This isn't a Lombard-specific defect. It's what happens when 1960s-70s stock meets a cold climate decade after decade. The pattern repeats across the 87 named areas in this service territory, which is exactly why we see the same failure mode on repeat, not as a one-off.

How to Book

Call or use the contact form on our site to get a technician out. Tell us the door's symptom - doesn't move, moves partway and stops, makes a bang - and whether it's a single or double door, since that changes which spring configuration we bring on the truck. A double door usually runs two torsion springs; a single often runs one, sometimes two depending on door weight.

We don't stock every spring size for every era of door. Original hardware from the 1940s through 1960s sometimes uses a wind and shaft diameter that isn't common stock anymore, and if that's your door, we may need a day to source the right coil rather than force a mismatched one onto your shaft. We'll tell you straight if that's the case instead of jamming in a close-enough part.

Once we're on site, the look is quick: we check wind direction, coil count, cable condition, and the drums before quoting the job. No guessing over the phone.

The Symptom

A broken torsion spring on a double door usually shows up the same way: the door won't lift with the opener, or it lifts a few inches and the opener strains and reverses. If you pull the release and try by hand, the door feels like it weighs four hundred pounds, because without the spring doing its job, it does. You might hear a loud bang from the garage a day or two before - that's the spring snapping on the shaft, not the opener failing.

Extension springs, the kind running along the horizontal tracks on older single-car doors, fail differently. One side gives out and the door goes crooked on its way up, binding in the tracks or dropping at an angle. That uneven motion is often what gets reported as a track problem when the actual cause is the spring.

Either way, the mistake is trying to force the door open repeatedly once a spring's gone. That puts the full load on the opener's gear and on the second spring if it's a double-spring door, and turns a spring repair into an opener and cable repair too.

What the Fix Involves

A spring job starts with releasing tension safely, pulling the broken coil off the shaft, and matching the replacement to the door's weight, wind direction, and drum size. On a double door we replace both springs even if only one broke, since the surviving one is the same age and under the same fatigue load - replacing one and leaving the other is a callback waiting to happen.

We check cables and rollers while we're in there, because a spring snap under load sometimes frays a cable or knocks a roller out of its track. If the shaft bearings are worn, we'll flag that too rather than bolt a new spring onto hardware that's already failing elsewhere.

One limitation worth saying plainly: if the door itself is original from the 1940s-60s and the panels are warped or rotted at the bottom, a spring repair gets the door moving again but doesn't fix a door that's structurally on its way out. In that case we'll tell you replacement is the better money, not a second repair call in six months.

Frequently asked questions