Garage Door Cable Repair in Los Angeles

A door leaning drunkenly in its opening with one corner sitting six inches lower than the other is almost always a cable, and it is a considerably smaller problem than it looks. Two lengths of braided steel run from the bottom bracket at each corner of the door up to the drums beside the spring. They transfer everything the springs are doing into the door itself, and when one lets go the affected side drops immediately while the other stays put, leaving the door hanging crooked in the opening and usually jammed against the track.

It looks alarming and it is, in fact, one of the more straightforward things we fix. Cable repair starts at $95 and is normally finished in under an hour.

Why Cables Fail

Three reasons account for nearly all of it. Fraying from age, where individual strands break one at a time until the remainder cannot take the load, and which looks exactly like a wire brush if you inspect the cable closely. Corrosion, which is a genuine issue on the coastal side of this city, since salt air through Venice, Playa del Rey and San Pedro attacks braided steel from inside the lay where nothing shows. And misalignment, where a drum that is out of true or a door that has been binding saws the cable against a groove or a pulley until it parts.

Do Not Try to Straighten It Yourself

A door with one cable gone is under uneven tension and is being held up largely by friction against a track it is now fighting. Pulling the emergency release, tugging at the door or pressing the opener button can drop it without warning, and a garage door coming down uncontrolled onto a car bonnet or a foot is a very different repair from a $95 cable. Leave it exactly where it is, keep people and vehicles from under it, and ring us. Our dispatcher will tell you what to do in the meantime, which is usually nothing at all.

Both Cables, and the Drums With Them

Cables are replaced as a pair for the same reason springs are, since the surviving one has taken identical service and is at the same stage of its life. The drums matter as much as the cables here. When a cable snaps or unwinds, it very often leaves the drum with the wrong number of wraps, and a door reassembled without resetting both drums to the same position will sit out of square and grind itself apart over the followingweeks. Our technician resets both. A drum that has worn a groove deep enough to saw at the cable is replaced at the same time, which is also when a tired spring is best dealt with rather than booked separately, as our spring replacement page explains, and a bar that has started to rumble in its bearings is dealt with while the assembly is open rather than on a second visit.

Squaring the Door Afterwards

Once new cables are on and the drums are set evenly, the door is run through its full travel several times and watched from inside for any tendency to lead on one side. The bottom brackets, which take the full cable load at each corner, are inspected, since these are frequently found cracked or pulling out of the section on older doors. Spring tension is checked and adjusted, because a cable rarely fails for no reason and a badly balanced door is one of the reasons.

Cables on a Door With Extension Springs

Doors running extension springs carry their cables differently, and they fail differently too. Instead of winding onto a drum, the cable runs from the bottom bracket over a pulley at each end of the horizontal track and back to the spring, which means a seized pulley saws through a cable rather than the cable simply wearing out on its own. Anything we replace on that arrangement takes new pulleys as a matter of course, since threading a fresh cable over a grooved sheave is a repair with a few months in it at best.

What Cable Work Costs

Replacing both lift cables starts at $95 fitted. Where drums or bottom brackets need replacing as well, those are quoted before anything is done and typically add between $45 and $120. Where the cable failure has pulled the door off its track, correcting that starts at $119 and is usually handled on the same visit. The $29 diagnostic comes off on approval, there is no callout fee, and the night rate is the day rate. Cables and springs fail closely enough together that our garage door spring repair page is worth reading alongside this one.