Garage door - how to identify and take apart safely

[cl]

I have a problem with an 'up and over' garage door. One of the nylon pulleys that the tension/balance wire runs round has partly pulled away from its support and become bent.

I need to un-tension the cable so I can fix it properly as it's very difficult to get at the fixing screws with the cable etc. in the way.

The tensioning springs are in a long rectangular box above the door and there appear to be *two* anchors at each end which seems a bit odd. At each end one can see the wire from the pulley going into the long box, an anchored spring and an anchored wire. The box is helpfully covered in so one can't see how its arranged.

Can anyone point me at a description of the tensioning mechanism and/or the safe way of releasing the tension so I can repair the bracket? I probably need to replace the wire as well because it has got frayed where it fell off the pulley.

[Chris Hogg]

I know little about garage doors, but one thing I am aware of is that those springs you mention can be lethal and take your fingers off very easily. Whatever you do, proceed with great caution.

[Adrian]

After fannying about for ages trying to figure out how to fix the spring/ pulley/wire setup on our old garage door, I got a man in.

[cl]

Well I have at least worked out the mechanism now.

It's an odd setup with tensioning springs (yes, they really are tension springs, not torsion springs) in the box above the door. The wire each side runs up and over a pulley (which is the broken one) and into the box above the door, round a pulley on the end of the spring, and then back to an anchor which I can see at the end of the box.

There appears to be no way to adjust/release the tension on the springs. It must just be a matter of having some safe way to hold the end of the wire when the springs are at minumum tension and pop it over the anchor.

If I could find a local 'garage door man' to deal with it I would but we're a bit out in the sticks in rural Suffolk so it's not always that easy. In addition I have a nasty feeling it might involve sucking of teeth and 'the whole thing needs replacing'.

I know they're dangerous, I'm not going to try anything unless I'm very sure it's not going to bite. I have previously quite successfully adjusted the tension on our other garage doors which have torsion springs.

[newshound]

Not sure I recognise this type, but the generic way to release a spring which is normally fixed in tension between two set points would be to put a loop on a long length of suitable cord / wire / baler twine around an accessible end of the spring, tension it sufficiently to unhook it from the "fixed point", and release it keeping the cord attached so that you don't "lose the end". Refitting is the reverse of removal.

But obviously, don't mess around unless you are confident of staying in control.

I was once faced with the problem of dismantling a device which contained a substantial spring (coil spring about 3 feet long, ten inches diameter, a dozen turns of 1 inch "wire") known to be compressed to a preload of several tons by a nut on a stud. These may have been assembled in a dedicated compressor, or more likely by winding the nut down the stud, then cutting off surplus from the studding. It was fairly obvious that removing the nut was *not* the way to do it. However the maintenance guys said it was no problem. They simply took a gas axe and applied it to a short length of the spring, judged from the deformation when it had relaxed sufficiently by creep, and burned through it. Nothing dramatic happened.

[ss]

I have done two of these type of doors, I cant remember the detail now as it was a few years back but I got the info on how to do it by googling, I am sure mine was garador. I was still very wary though but it is actually quite easy.

[ss]

A pdf instruction:

[cl]

Brilliant, thank you. So it's a Garador. There's no labels or markings that I could spot that gave the make, hence my original question.