Parts We Carry
We carry torsion springs sized to match both the original 1980s-spec doors still on plenty of University Park garages and the heavier insulated steel doors homeowners are moving to now. That matters because swapping a light wood-panel door for a modern insulated one changes the spring wind rate - you can't just hang the new door on the old spring and call it done.
Track and drum sets come in standard and low-headroom configurations, which covers both the original framing common to homes from that build year and any garages that have had ceiling work done since. We stock steel rollers rated for regular use rather than the nylon rollers that were standard when these houses were built, since nylon degrades faster under sustained heat.
For openers, we install units with modern safety sensors and manual disconnects, which older installs frequently lack entirely. We don't stock every wood or custom-clad door on the market - special order doors run on a longer lead time than what we keep on the truck, and we'll tell you that up front rather than quote a date we can't hit.
What the Fix Involves
Installation starts with pulling the old door, spring, and track as a set, not just hanging a new door on old hardware. Given how much of the original 1987-era gear is still in place on a lot of these garages, we expect to replace the spring and drums even when the customer only asked about the door panel - reusing forty-year-old torsion springs under a heavier new door is how cables snap early.
We re-square the track to the opening, which on an older frame sometimes means shimming for settling that's happened over three-plus decades. If headroom is tight, that's where a low-headroom bracket kit comes in, fitted before the new door goes up, not after.
Once the door's hung, we balance the spring tension to the actual door weight and set the opener's force and travel limits - critical with insulated doors, which weigh more than the panel they're replacing. Last step is testing the auto-reverse safety sensors, since a lot of original 1980s openers never had them at all. The whole job runs longer on a house with original hardware than on one where the door was already replaced once, and we'll tell you that difference before we start, not after.
