Spring Replacement for Chicago Garage Doors

A garage door spring is not a generic part. Wire diameter, inside diameter and length together decide how much weight it counterbalances, and a spring that is close but not right leaves the door heavy at the floor or drifting open at the top. On older Chicago garages this gets interesting, because plenty of doors have been swapped once or twice since the garage was built and the spring still on the shaft was sized for whatever hung there before.

So we work from the door, not from what is already fitted. A solid wood door on a coach house behaves nothing like a modern steel one of the same size, and an insulated replacement door is heavier again. Where an old door still runs extension springs stretched along the horizontal tracks with no containment cable through them, we will point that out and recommend adding one.

Stop using the opener. That is the whole list. A motor asked to lift an uncounterbalanced door will strip its drive gear, cook its capacitor, or pull a cable off the drum, and then you are paying to fix three things instead of one.

If the car is inside and you need it, say so when you book. Getting a vehicle out from under a failed spring is doable, but it takes two people and it is not something to try alone in an alley. Our vans carry the common torsion sizes, so most spring calls are finished in a single visit, and the estimate is free and given before any work starts.