Getting It Booked In
When a spring goes on a garage door, the door doesn't open partway or slow down - it stops, or it slams. That's the fault we're called out for most in Burbank: a torsion spring that's snapped clean through, usually a coil that's been winding and unwinding since Lyndon Johnson was president.
Burbank's housing stock centers on 1965, right in the middle of the 1938-1994 range across the areas we cover. A door built or replaced in that era almost always runs on a single torsion spring mounted above the header, not the dual-spring or extension-spring setups you see on newer construction. That single point of failure is why one bad spring means a dead door, full stop, not a door that limps along.
We come out from Chicago, about 8 miles in. There's no local branch to dispatch from, so we're upfront that we're driving in, not sitting five minutes away. Booking is straightforward: tell us what the door is doing (or not doing), and whether you can see the spring - coiled tight and split, or hanging loose - and we'll get the right spring on the truck before we leave.
What You Are Seeing
A snapped torsion spring usually announces itself with a bang from the garage, loud enough that people inside the house hear it. After that, the door won't lift with the opener - or it will, briefly, before the opener strains and quits, because it isn't built to lift the door's full weight alone.
Look up at the spring above the door, if it's safe to do so from outside the door's path: a snapped spring shows a visible gap in the coil, sometimes with the two halves twisted apart. A spring that's just worn but not broken will show frayed or stretched coils and a door that closes unevenly, drifting to one side as it comes down.
Don't try to lift the door yourself once the spring's gone. Without it, a standard door section runs 130-200 lbs, all of which the springless system can no longer support.
What the Fix Involves
On a single-spring door from this era, the job is a straight swap: unwind and remove the old spring, install a new one matched to the door's weight and the drum size on the shaft, and rebalance the door so it holds level at the halfway point. We check the cable and the bearing plate at the same time, since they take the same wear cycle.
If the door has been running on a mismatched or hardware-store spring from a past repair, we'll flag that. Springs are sized to the door, not just the opening, and a wrong-size spring wears out the opener trying to compensate.
We carry standard torsion spring sizes on the truck. If your door needs an oddball size - an older custom door, or a spring that was never standard to begin with - that part isn't something we stock, and we'll tell you it needs to be ordered rather than pretend otherwise.
