Torsion Spring Replacement

Sizing Comes Before Anything Else

A torsion spring is not a generic part. It is defined by four numbers: wire diameter, inside diameter, length, and which way it is wound. Change any one of them and you change how much lift the spring gives per turn.

The correct combination comes from the weight of your door and the diameter of the cable drums. Nothing else. Not the width of the opening, not the brand of the door, and certainly not what is stacked in the back of the van.

This matters because doors of identical size vary enormously in weight. A single layer steel door on an older Huntington Beach tract house might come in near a hundred and thirty pounds. The same opening with a three layer insulated door, a full row of glazing and a hardwood overlay can be past two hundred. Fit the first door’s springs to the second and the spring is overworked from the moment it is wound.

How We Find the Weight

Either we put a scale under the door with the springs already unwound, which is the honest way and takes a few minutes, or where that is impractical we calculate it from panel construction, glazing, gauge and track type and then verify with the balance test at the end.

The balance test is the check on the arithmetic. If the sizing was right, the door will hold at any height by hand. If it will not, the number was wrong and we change it, rather than winding a bit more tension in and hoping.

Both Springs, and Why We Are Firm About It

On a two spring door, both springs have completed the same number of cycles under the same load in the same air. One of them has now failed. The other is a coin flip away.

There is a second reason beyond the obvious one. A brand new spring and a fatigued spring do not deliver equal torque, so the shaft is being twisted harder at one end than the other. That pushes the door slightly out of square through its travel, loads the bearings unevenly, and puts more tension on one cable than the other.

You can decline it. Plenty of people do, and we will still do the work. We will just write on the invoice what we recommended.

Cycle Life, Honestly

Springs are rated in cycles, one cycle being up and down once. A standard spring is usually rated around 10,000 cycles. High cycle stock is available at roughly double and quadruple that.

Whether it is worth paying for depends entirely on use. A household that opens the door four times a day is looking at years either way. A house with the garage as the main entrance, teenagers, and two vehicles in and out is a genuinely different duty cycle, and there the upgrade pays for itself.

What high cycle stock will not do is rescue bad sizing. An undersized spring rated for a great many cycles still fails early, because it is working outside the range those cycles were counted in.

While the Tension Is Off

The shaft is only ever accessible with the springs unwound, so this is the moment for the parts nobody wants to pay a second visit for.

• New end bearings and a new centre bearing plate. Cheap, they wear, and a rumbling bearing is the most common cause of a door that got noisier after a spring job.
• Drums checked for wear in the grooves and seated square, then set so both cables wind at the same rate.
• Cables inspected along their length and at the bottom brackets, which near the coast means looking for rust bleeding out from between the strands.
• Bottom brackets checked for cracks and elongated bolt holes.

What We Will Not Do

We will not talk a homeowner through winding their own springs over the phone. Winding bars slip, and a spring under full tension holds a serious amount of energy. Rollers, weather seal, a bent hinge, we will happily explain. Springs are where this trade actually hurts people.

Call (714) 987-8780 and describe what the door is doing.