This story is from a few weeks ago, but it's one of the more exciting things that's happened recently...
It was a Sunday morning, and I had Stuff to do. First up was a trip to the grocery store, so I walked out the door, list in hand. I punched the button for the garage door, and in addition to the normal garage door sounds, I heard a big metallic "sproing". I wasn't paying too much attention at that point, but remember that - it factors in later. I backed the car out, and punched the garage door button and things went very wrong very quickly. The door was descending in a dishearteningly lopsided manner. I muttered, put the car in park, and got out to investigate. Additional punching of the button only made things worse (but I felt I had to at least TRY that...) At this point, two rollers in the upper left corner of my big double garage door were off the track.
What's a girl to do? I used a life line - Phone a Friend. I called Rob and asked if he would come over and help me at least get the door all the way down, so I could go about my Sunday Stuff and worry about the door later.
He came. We assessed. We pulled the emergency release and attempted to put the door down, which didn't work, and then we attempted to put the door all the way up which also didn't work. Now in addition to the two upper left rollers, the lower right roller was off the track. I thanked Rob very much and called a professional, after cancelling the rest of my plans for the day.
Did you know you can get a garage door repaired any time, any day of the week? Prior to this, neither did I. The repair guy spent about thirty seconds looking at my crooked, dangling, broken mess of a garage door and said, "Oh, yeah, no problem. I can have this fixed in about twenty minutes." TWENTY MINUTES? I was convinced the door would never go down again and would have to be hauled off and sold for scrap! I told the guy I was very curious to see what magic he could do in twenty minutes that fixed the problem. I learned SO MUCH that day.
It's not labeled in the diagram, but right about where it says "WINDING CONE" there is a bolt that holds tension on the spring. That bolt is the key to the universe (of garage doors, at least). The "sproing" noise I heard was my bolt coming loose and disappearing. We looked but never found it. Once the spring loses tension, the left and right cable drums can't keep their cables neatly in a spool, so the cables become a big mass of loose tangle all over the place. Without the spring and the cables to keep things aligned, the rollers start coming off the track.
Twenty minutes and $450 later, my garage door is all fixed, and it works better than it did the day I bought the house.
