Southlake, TX · Garage Door Service
Torsion and extension spring repair for the 25 communities around Southlake, TX, where 2000s-era garage doors are now hitting the age their springs give out.
A broken spring job is a torsion or extension spring swap, not a patch. On a double door you replace both torsion springs even if only one snapped, because the surviving one is close behind and running it alone overloads the shaft and the cable drums. We measure wire size, coil diameter, and wind length off the old spring or the drum, set the new spring on the correct side with a winding bar, and back it off to test balance before the door ever runs on the opener again.
Extension spring setups, still common on older single doors in this area, get a straight swap plus a check of the safety cables that run through the spring - a lot of installs from the 1990s and early 2000s never had them added later, and we're not leaving a live spring uncontained.
What we don't do: we don't wind an old spring tighter to squeeze another year out of it, and we don't sell a spring swap on a door whose track or bottom bracket is already bent from the spring failure. If the door came off the rollers when the spring let go, that's a separate repair, and we'll say so before we quote the spring.
Most spring jobs run under two hours on site once the truck has the right wire gauge - torsion springs aren't a stock size, they're matched to door weight and drum size, and a wrong-size spring either won't lift the door or will slam it up too hard. If we don't have the exact spring on the truck, we can usually source it same day, but a nonstandard door - custom wood, insulated glass panels, oversize - can push a spring order out further.
The repair itself is quick once parts are in hand: pull the old springs, set the new ones, balance the door by hand before the opener takes any load, then run it through a full cycle test. What takes longer is diagnosing whether the spring failure has already damaged anything downstream - a cable that jumped its drum, a bent shaft, a bottom bracket pulled loose. Those add time because they're separate parts, not because the spring swap itself is slow.
Housing across this service area was built between 1953 and 2014, and the bulk of it - across all 25 communities we cover, from Trophy Club and Westlake in close to further out - dates to the 2000s. That matters for springs specifically: a torsion spring is rated for roughly 10,000 cycles, and a door installed when a neighborhood was built in the early 2000s is now old enough that the spring is at or past that number in a lot of houses, independent of how well the door was maintained.
The climate here runs a moderate heat band, not an extreme one, so we're not seeing the spring failures that come from constant expansion-contraction cycling in high-humidity heat or from hard freeze-thaw. What we see instead is straightforward fatigue: steel that's done its rated number of lifts. With 44,702 owner-occupied houses among 64,328 households in this area, and most of that stock landing in the same construction window, spring failure here tracks age of installation more than any other single factor.
The door won't lift, or it lifts a few inches and stops, or the opener strains and reverses. Sometimes it's a loud bang from the garage before any of that - that's the spring itself letting go, and if you hear it, don't run the door on the opener afterward. With no spring tension, the opener is lifting the full weight of the door alone, and that burns out the opener's motor or gear fast.
A visual check: look at the spring above the door, on the torsion bar. A separated coil with a gap in it is a broken torsion spring. On extension-spring doors, check the springs running along the horizontal tracks near the top - a stretched or gapped coil there is the same failure, different hardware.
One thing we won't do is tell you a spring repair fixes an opener that's already burned out from being run without spring tension - if that's happened, you're looking at an opener repair on top of the spring, and we'll quote both separately so you know what you're actually paying for.
We don't recommend it. A wound torsion spring under load can cause serious injury if the winding bar slips, and the tension numbers are specific to your door's weight and size. Extension springs are lower risk but still under load. This is one job where the tools and the experience matter more than the part itself.
Torsion springs are rated for a set number of open-close cycles, typically around 10,000. Once a spring nears that count, it can fail on what looks like a completely normal lift. Given how much of the housing stock in this area dates to the 2000s, a lot of original springs are now old enough to be near or past that number.
Yes, on a double door with torsion springs we replace both even if only one broke. The other one is close behind on cycle count, and running a mismatched pair puts uneven load on the shaft and drums, which shortens the life of the new spring and the old one both.
If the door is heavy to lift by hand with the opener disconnected, it's the spring - a properly sprung door should lift with one hand and stay roughly where you put it. If it lifts easily by hand but the opener still struggles, the opener itself needs a look.
Call or request a quote - tell us what your door is doing and where you are.
