What the Repair Takes
A torsion spring job means clamping the door down, releasing the wound spring safely, pulling the old one off the header bracket, and matching the replacement to the door's actual weight - not just swapping in whatever was there. On a lot of these older Pittsburgh houses, the original opening was framed for a lighter door, so we're often correcting the spring size rather than just replacing it like-for-like.
We check the drums, cables, and center bearing at the same time, since a spring failure under strain frequently takes a cable or bends a track bracket with it. If the opener has been fighting a heavy door for months before it finally gave out, the gear and sprocket assembly inside the unit is worth inspecting too - we see stripped gears on openers that were quietly overworked by a spring that had already lost tension.
Most of this is a same-visit job once we're on site and have the right spring on the truck. Where it isn't: doors with custom or oversized openings sometimes need a spring we don't carry as a standard stock item, and that means a short parts wait. We'll tell you upfront if that's the case rather than guess and come back twice.
What You Are Seeing
The door won't budge, or it moves a few inches and stops. You hear a loud bang from the garage, usually followed by the door refusing to open at all - that's the spring letting go. Sometimes it's quieter: the opener strains, clicks, or reverses itself halfway up, which points to a spring that's lost tension gradually rather than snapped clean.
A door that feels unusually heavy when you try to lift it by hand, with the opener disconnected, is telling you the spring isn't doing its job anymore. If one side of the door hangs lower than the other, that's often a single spring failure on a two-spring system, and the door is still trying to run on half its lift.
Cables that look frayed or loose at the bottom bracket usually mean the spring failure already happened and the cable is what's kept the door from crashing down since.
