If your garage door track is misaligned, it can cause lots of different problems. One, it can make your garage go louder. Two, it can cause the rollers to wear out quicker. And three, it can cause the rollers to get stuck, which could make your cables jump off of the drums and cause the door to go out of alignment. So let me show you how to align your tracks in order to avoid these problems. Here's an example of a track that's aligned. If you put your finger in here, you can feel that it's smooth where these
two tracks come together. Here's an example of a poorly aligned track, and this may be a little extreme. The garage door installers that put your door in would likely never leave your track like this. But in the event that your track becomes like this, or even about half as bad as this, you're going to want to loosen the bolts and readjust it so that the tracks are better aligned. Before you attempt doing this, I really suggest wearing gloves because this metal is all really sharp and it can cut you really easily. So the first thing you're going to want to do is get a 716 bit. And you can either do that
with a ratchet or wrench. I have all three. Or a socket like this. I use a drill because it's the fastest, but in this case, we'll use a socket
because most people will either have this or a wrench around their house. What you're going to want to do is you're going to want to put it in reverse. So mine, I flip it this way to go in reverse. I'm going to loosen this bolt and see how it comes right back out to where this
just makes this rail loose. But I also had to loosen these bolts down here as well before I did that. So you want to go two or three bolts down, you want to make sure that they're loose, and then you want to pull this track back to where it's pretty smooth with your finger right here. Once you get there, that one wants to shift on me. You're going to tighten the track bolts up, tighten this one up. And then to finish, I would tighten the rest of these bolts up down here. Now, if the top track is
pushed back or forward, what you're going to have to do is you're going to have to loosen these track bolts
up here, as well as this bolt that's up here in what
we call the flag bracket. You're going to have to loosen this bolt, and then you're going to have to adjust it forward or backward, whichever direction you need to go. And if it's too hard to do that, then there's also a bolt in the back that you can take out, and that will help you adjust the top track forward or backward, depending on what you need. Keep in mind, if you do have to loosen this bolt, you may also have to loosen this bolt as well that holds this bearing plate on. And understand that you don't want to take the nuts off of them. You just want to loosen the nuts so that it will shift a little bit. You're not going to mess anything up. You're not going to be in any danger. If you're concerned about the spring or the cable or anything, don't be. As long as you just keep the nuts on there and you just kind of wiggle this, this is all going to stay in place. There's nothing to worry about there. Also understand that you do this
at your own discretion, though, so please be careful with the way you do it. So that's about it. It's not too difficult to adjust these tracks. You just need the right size
socket or wrench to do it. And most of the time, the three
sizes that you're going to need to adjust the bolts in
the back or these bolts on here is going to be a 716, a half inch or 916. If this is something that
seems a little too technical or you don't want to try and do it yourself, or if you have any other problems with your garage door or garage door opener,
please contact us today. We can help.
