How to Safely Replace Garage Door Springs & Save Hundreds

in this video I'm going to show you everything that you need to know how to safely replace your garage door springs not only that we're going to focus on safety of course but we're also going to show you how you can save so much money doing this if you're willing to put in the time to learn how to do it which is really going to be covered entirely in this video and then in my case I'm saving about $330 from having to call a technician now I had two friends recently who had their garage door springs break they're both in the local area here I live in Utah and each of them called different texts and had them replace only the Springs nothing else they didn't do drums or tracks or anything like that just the Springs each of them paid $450 I did the research and figured this out and my total cost out the door including shipping taxes everything was about $120 so that $330 savings I want to pass on to you so that you can do this but if you're not willing to slow down and do this right don't do it safety is your main priority here there's a lot of pressure going on there's a lot of tension on these Springs and I've heard some horror stories of a couple things really terrible things happening with injuries and things like that teeth being knocked out all that kind of stuff so take it seriously take it slow if you follow everything that we're showing in this video you should be in good shape to be able to replace this yourself and save hundreds of dollars in the process I've broken the video down into four separate steps the first one that gets skipped so many times in videos and articles is how to find the right Springs that you're going to replace yours with now I've got two scenarios we're covering here in my case I'm using both scenarios the first is that you've got a broken spring like this one up here so if that happens then a lot of times you can just replace it with the same set or you can upgrade it to one with a higher cycle count which is basically a longer lifespan or in the second scenario if you've added weight to your door like I have here with this insulation then that's going to require you to upgrade your Springs as well now I've got both scenarios going on so I've researched and found the new Springs that I need and there are some amazing tools out there that I'm going to point you to that will help you with that so that's the first thing second is how to safely remove your old Springs there's several steps we're going to follow and if you go with me on this you're going to do just fine third we're going to put the new Springs on and bring them up to tension we're going to show you how to use the winding bars to get those just to the right place and then get your door properly balanced and then fourth and final we're going to actually cover a little bit about maintenance and making sure that you only have to watch this video Once that's my goal I want you in and out and done with all of this after one viewing basically or after following along the steps once so I'm going to show you exactly what you need for maintenance on that what to check what to look out for and how to make sure your door stays balanced long term if you're ready for all that and you're willing to take the time to do this safely and do it right let's go for it in order to get the right new springs for your garage door we need to identify a few different things and even if you already know some of this you want to make sure to try to get all of this information just because you want to get this absolutely right last thing you want to do is get the wrong springs for your door and then have to send them back and go through that whole process after you've installed them not a good situation so there's three things that we need to know about the garage door and track and then and there are four things we need to know about the Springs so for the door the first thing we need to know is how tall it is usually it's going to be 7 or 8 ft next we need to know what the track radius is and that's almost always going to be 12 or 15 in and then thirdly we're going to need to know how heavy the door is and I'm going to show you how to find that out using some scales now for the spring itself there are four things that we need there as well first we need to know the total length of the spring when it's compressed we also need to know the inside diameter we also need to know what the wire thickness is it's called the Spring size lastly for the spring we need to understand the wind direction now this is important in some ways for the install but it's not necessarily important that you figure out which one is broken for example we'll get more into that in just a little bit so let's start by showing you how to identify each of these for the garage door height it's really just a matter of measuring it typically it's going to be 7t or 8T and just get your measuring tape out keep in mind it's not going to be an exact measurement so mine's not likely going to be 8 ft directly if you look at the very top of it it is about 8 ft but a lot of times you can't see past the support bar on top here so mine is an 8-footer which really runs to about 94 in on that header yours is likely going to be seven or eight in most cases so figure out your door height from there we need to figure out what our track radius is the track radius is the radius of this curve right here and to find that I've got a measuring tape that has a magnetic end which is pretty handy that's just fastened to the bottom of the track on top then we're going to use a level put the top of it aligned with the joint at the bottom of the radius try to get it level which in my case is right about there and then find out what that measurement looks like at the top of the level now in my case level might not actually be what we want because we may want to go with the curvature of the actual garage floor which is what this one parallels but either way you can see the top of the level is at about 12 in 11 to 12 the opposite would be if we had a 15-in radius down here so whichever it's closest to 12 or 15 that's the number now this is where we're going to introduce two super important safety features the first one you need to wear safety glasses the entire time you're working on anything with the Springs the door anything like that where something could come loose it's just a good idea to be smart about that the second and I think maybe the most important safety thing of this entire process is knowing how to stay away from this zone right here so right here this is called the winding cone on the end of the spring this spring is live and active I'm going to try my best not to touch this or interact with it too much anymore than I have to most importantly if anything on the winding cone comes loose especially these little red square-headed keys right here they're just mounting screws essentially if those come loose this whole thing will come flying with tons of pressure and tons of force and speed we want to be clear of that those can be very dangerous and the winding bars could go flying all that kind of stuff so I'm going to keep my body and my head out of this zone right here I'm just going to stay away from I'm going to stay on one side of it the entire time I'm working and that will keep me safe in order to get the weight of your garage door go the simplest way you can try to work smarter not harder on this one if there are labels on your garage door that tell you maybe a manufacturer and a model number just punch that in online and see if it will provide the weight for you look for any easy ways to do this so that you don't have to actually weigh this out manually but in a lot of cases you're not going to have a choice so I've got insulation on here everything's covered and the insulation adds its own weight so I want to get it accurate so what I'm going to do is use a couple of these analog scales I'm using two in this case because this is a 16t garage door for a two-car garage door if you have a onecar garage door then you could probably get away with just one now these were 15 bucks each at Walmart they have a 300 lb weight limit so I figured I would use these in future vide so I wanted to just purchase these if you don't have one of these or have access one you probably don't need to purchase one maybe just ask your grandma she probably has one of these analog scales the reason we're using analog not digital is because digital ones have a very small window of just a few seconds in which they gather the weight and we need more than that because we're going to be using these several times and we need to be able to just have a real-time rating of what that weight is now this often will require two people in order to do this right because one of you is going to be up on the ladder lifting up the garage door now in order to do that this is where your winding bars come in I can't emphasize to you enough do not skimp do not try to take a shortcut on this get actual winding bars they don't cost much they're 15 or 20 bucks for a set and these are what you really need to any of this job you cannot use rebar you cannot use screwdrivers you cannot use some bar that you got hanging around that looks good enough get winding bars this is a true safety issue in this case now these particular ones have these little rubber markers on them and that will help us to know exactly 1 in depth down from the end and that helps us to make sure that they're properly seated while using them if you don't have these little markers on them use some electrical tape and make that marking yourself 1 in from either end now speaking of safety we're going to do two things at this point that apply for the rest of the process here the first one disengage your garage door from the motor Carriage so you want to pull on that string Str there that little emergency pull string and make sure that's disengaged so that your garage door is not attached to the motor assembly number two we want to shut off all the power to your motor Al together so make sure to just unplug it don't try to just disable it with a button or anything just unplug it pull the plug on that and you're good to go in addition to the two scales you're also going to need some lengths of 2x4 I recommend you get some that are at least about 3 ft long and 2x4s are pretty cheap so go buy one if you need to but you'll probably got some scraps laying around that will do the job we're going to lift the door up just a little bit using our winding bar we're going to pop the scales in on either side and then we're going to take the readings and this is where that second person is going to be able to help you out here so I'm going to use my two winding bars that we showed earlier I've got my daughter here helping me out with the scales I'm going to start out by lifting the garage door using the winding bars here so I'm going to put one of these in up here again kind of staying off to the side and as I pull on it pull down it's going to lift up the garage door and I've got it seated firmly in there that's why those little black marks are so so helpful I can see that it's seated all the way down to the black mark I'll put my next one in now I've got the garage door lifted enough that we can put the scales underneath so she's putting these scales in for me right underneath the door now as I lower this and put the weight now by the way I've got the scales zeroed out already so there's no issues there so I've got it zeroed with the weight on top and then as I put this on here it's going to read one thing but the first thing I need to do is make sure that there's no settling that needs to take place so I'm going to give the door a good Shake all right and then Anie if you'll read the scales now this is kind of the before but because I have one broken spring I'm actually going to need to adjust it and put a little more pressure on there by turning the shaft 45° out of the 360 so about 1/8 turn to make sure I see what those are what is it measuring right now so 50 and 85 there we go what I'm doing is I'm trying to cause a little slack in the cables I'm watching my cables they're loose let's get another reading on them 103 95 so we're just shy of 200 lbs total for our garage door weight on this particular one now we've got that weight I'm going to lift these up again so that we can take those scales out and we're good if you would thank you very carefully let that one down and we're done now for the four bits of information we need for the spring itself these are actually pretty easy to find in many cases but I'm going to show you both ways to find them I actually pulled this label off of the left spring the one that was sitting on the left side of the Center Bar and this one has everything that I need right on it which is fantastic sometimes you'll get lucky and you'll have all of this so right up here you can see it says RW which means right wound and that means it's the one that's on the left side of the center as you're facing the inside of the garage as you're standing inside the garage and also it says .19 two so that refers to the wire size or the spring size here that's how big each one of these is and then the two here refers to the inside diameter of the spring which is another bit of information we need and then 18.5 that's the length of the spring so I got all of that information just off this label makes it really easy sometimes you'll just have a part number like this one 7154 if you Google that and put it in garage spring or torsion spring a lot of times you'll find all of this same information when you pull up the page result with that part number so that can be really helpful as well now assuming you don't have that you can still find all of the information you need for this to start out with the spring length this is just what you think it is it's just measuring the entire spring now it's key here that when you do this the spring has no breake in it and then it's not under tension so here you can see this is this replacement spring that I'm using is a 36 in Spring and so we can see that pretty easily if you've got a broken spring then you can actually loosen one end of it with the winding cone and then put it together with the other end that's broken and get that measurement that way that's probably the easiest and best way to get your length just from a broken spring you can see on this new one it says 234 printed right on here and that's the key to the next step you can actually just look and see if there's some information printed right on here this one only says 234 but my other model the old one that broke has a lot more information than that printed on it so be sure to look for Clues on that one especially if you have a broken spring if they're under tension you're not going to be B to read anything this is all going to be twisted mangled up so that's not going to help so it really only helps once they're loosened or broken when it comes to finding out your wire size the way you do that is you count 20 of these coils here so to give you an example of that if we take for example see if I go I'll go above the 2 3 4 here I'll start where that two is so if I start right there and say 1 2 3 4 5 16 17 18 19 20 okay to the 20 I can see that I'm at 4 and 3/4 roughly so I need to divide that 4 and 3/4 by 20 and then I'll get my wire size and that's the easiest and most accurate way to get your wire size on these you can do it by 10 you can do it by 20 you can also measure in different parts of it just to make sure and again this requires the spring not be under tension so as I do the math here 4.75 / 20 = 2375 and that's actually within a few thousands of the exact measurement of this with which is 234 that these are so you know that came out pretty close which is pretty great so we can round up to that nearest number to find out exactly what that is but that gives us a pretty accurate measurement of our wire size one thing to always check is for stamps or marks on your Springs now obviously this is a new spring so everything's clean and easy to read but typically these are still very much legible even on an older spring that's a little bit dirty if you give it a little wipe around this winding cone on the end here and you'll notice on here it says p200 s and then I believe that's a six there and basically that lets us know that the 200 refers to the inside diameter of the spring so that's an easy way to get your inside diameter that's saying it's a 2in inside diameter you usually have some sort of marking and then I'll put a link in the description to a site that has a chart with all of the different stamps that you might find on the winding cones that will help you interpret what that inside diameter is and sometimes they'll have other information on there as well but typically the inside diameter is going to be consistent because this winding cone can only be a 2in inside diameter the last thing we need to know is left wind versus right wind and there's a really simple way to tell on this one when you're standing inside your garage as long as the Springs are in the right place then the one on the left is actually a right wind makes perfect sense right and the one on the right is the left wind now again check labels first maybe you'll find that printed on here or find some easy way to tell if not there's a little trick to looking at this if you've got a broken spring like this one I can see that there's the end of it right here or I can see this end right here doesn't matter it's going to read the same no matter what it is and you can just use your hands to remember which is which so if I use my right hand here you can see that my index finger is going counterclockwise so if that's the way your spring looks when you look at the end of it that means it's your right hand so it's a right wind opposite on your left hand there's a left wind and it's going clockwise and that's for a left Wind Spring now the only reason that might matter is if you have two new Springs and one of the new Springs breaks gets lock C damage something like that in almost every case you're going to want to replace both Springs and again the only time you're not going to do that is if you know that b Springs like the other one that's there that's still good is new then you can just replace the one that needs to be replaced and the other one's probably going to be fine if both your Springs are a little bit older and one breaks it's likely that the other one's going to break not long after so just replace them both now that you're armed with all the information about your Springs keep your safety glasses on cuz the internet can be a dangerous place and we're going to hop over to a website now again no sponsors here whatsoever this is just a tool that I found super helpful and this whole entire website is really helpful this is called DDM garaged doors.com it's founded by a guy named Dan music and he's got tons of great information on here so I'll put the links in the description be sure to check that out here this is in my opinion probably the easiest way to find out what Springs you need and it's something that took me several days before I found this I was looking on forums and all kinds of stuff so hop over here down on the bottom of the page there's this find my spring database there's a little tool here and you've got these five different tabs across the top that you can use to figure out what's what and the easiest one here only needs four bits of information it's the find my spring so inside diameter we know on ours it was 2 in wire size this one depends on I know the new ones at least were going to be 234 so I'm going to use that and length on these new ones was 35 if I'm not mistaken and the door height on mine is 8 ft so then I hit go and look what pops up right here I believe these are the exact torsion springs that I have but uh this gives me all the information I need including the lift here so I've got my wire my length my spring weight how much each one weighs I've Got My Cycles this is important so you want to go for something with a higher cycle count because that's going to matter as far as how much you actually can do so the Cycles on this one for 12in radius tracks is 33,000 the lift on this one is 103 lb each so these two Springs together in my case are rated to lift 2 6 lb which is just over what I need and it's about as close as I'm going to get that's fantastic that's what I'm going with now you can see all of these ones are really similar in lift 103 102.4 103.1 so all of these are other options and some of these you see we've got I've did the 33,000 Cycles ones you can get these ones here that aren't that much more that will go 77,000 and that's really the big difference between these Springs is you want to get ones that are rated for a higher cycle count they're going to last longer and you see the price difference I paid about 63 bucks for two of these and with this one it's about 92 bucks so $30 difference and you get quite a few really double the life cycle out of it so that's an option if you want to go with that the ones that came on mine were probably 12 to 18,000 10,000 is the minimum you want to look at but the more you go typically the better at least to a certain point I don't really need my Springs to last 600 years but I want them to last quite a while the other reason I'm going with 33,000 on mine instead of higher is because I'm converting this into a shop this garage and I'm not going to be using the garage door very often so keep in mind your usage if you've got two cars they're going in and out all day every day then you probably want to get that higher cycle count now just to show you another option here I can also go find by door weight we know that our door weight was about 200 lb punch in our height of 8 ft our track radius of 12 in and our inside diameter of 2 in we know we want two Springs and by the way you can do this with one Spring and most of the the time that's not going to be a good fit for most people usually it's going to be two balanced Springs but they give you the option and then I hit go and then I get this chart again now this is really close 99.9 for each spring as far as its lift capacity 100.2 so these are almost spot-on for what I need but when I spoke with a technician at DDM they suggested going with the ones I went with it gives me a little leeway in there in case these get a little heavier with Hardware or other facings that I put on there anything like that so it gives me a little room to breathe in there which is good now that you've identified your torsion springs hopefully you can order those and get those shipped to your house or maybe even pick them up locally and that is a big check for that step next we're going to move on to the process of removing the old torsion springs as we begin this step this is where the rubber hits the road and let's make sure we're doing this safely so first put those safety glasses on if you haven't already done so second we want to disengage any form of power or connection to the garage door opener so pull the plug on your garage door opener so there's no power getting to it at all and then also disconnect your gar garage door from The Carriage next make sure you've got a sturdy ladder or step stool don't use a box or a bucket or a table or whatever you've got hanging around the garage use something that is meant for you to stand up on I'm using a step ladder it's got three steps and it gets me to exactly the right height find something like that lastly with the safety precautions I've mentioned this already once before but I want to re-emphasize you just have to assume that some of these things are going to break while you're working on them because if you don't then you're going to put yourself In Harm's Way so just act like something's going to break at any time particular L Ally the spring that could come Unwound the winding cones that could fly really fast and have these little keys in them that could remove some flesh and they have done so for people in the past so just be super careful with all of that that means keeping your head and your body out of this unwinding zone so on this particular space right here you need to be on one side or the other never put your head in the way of those winding bars going flying it also means that you don't put your hands directly on the spring when it's got any tension on it and that you're just being extra careful of all of those things so that you don't get pinched grabbed smacked or whatever else might happen just play it safe now that we know we're being safe we're going to take a look at the new Springs that have come from our shipment and we're going to notice a couple of things these top Parts here these are called the keys that are on here we're going to be working quite a bit with those those are what fasten into the shaft and then we're also noticing that there is some red painted on one of these and some black painted on the other so the red one typically means that that's going to go on the left side of the garage door it means it's a right wind and you can tell Again by looking at where where is it here the end right here of the spring and if that one is going the same way as our right hand just like this I don't know how well you can see that but this is a right wind that means it's going on the left side I know it's confusing they're backwards but that's how it goes um same thing on our left wind here this one goes on the right side and it's got black on top so black to the right red to the left on your 4-in drums on either side of the garage door use a Sharpie to make a line we're going to just make an alignment Mark here so that we can easily find this later I'm also going to make a little line around it so it makes it easier to know exactly where this lines up to horizontally when we go to remount it I have positioned myself right in the middle of the spring that currently has tension on it the one on the right side here in my case is broken so I'm underneath the left tension spring now I want to again stay clear of the unwinding path of the winding cone here and I'm going to start by using one of my winding s remember we've got these markers on here 1 in up and that helps us to know that they're properly seated so you should be listening for a nice thud like this that's what we want we want to thud bottom out inside the steing area there and then as soon as you put a little pressure on here you should notice a couple of things there should be quite a bit of tension on there from the spring and then if you look on either side where the 4-in drums are with the cable wrapped around those should start to go slack as soon as you put some upward pressure on this and that's what's happening in my scenario here so once you've got that done we're going to grab the second bar we're going to lift this one up just to where we can put the second bar in and again th it into place and then we're going to rest it against this metal bar on the top of the door right there so now we relieve the pressure from the drums and the cables and then we're holding this in place with this here I'm being careful not to touch this at all going to set my second winding bar up grab my 3/8 in open-ended wrench and then I'll start to loosen the set screws or Keys here they shouldn't require a lot of effort I'm just having to constantly remind myself to just be careful of body placement hand placement all of that it's good then the next one for me is kind of hidden over here now I'm specifically using open-ended wrenches here because that way if I use a socket set it could kind of lock on there and if this does break free it'll just smack over and over whereas these things will just come flying out and hopefully not be as likely to smack us all right so my two set screws are loose I've got one here and one here and at this point I've got the entire tension of the spring resting on the bar with my set screws loose I can now begin the process process of unwinding all of the tension out of this so I'm going to lift just a little bit to get that bottom one out and I'm keeping pressure upwards towards the center of the winding cone and I'm just going to do this over and over release that one and let it go and there's definitely tension starting to come out of this again keeping everything clear of that path I'm going to grab the bottom one down it goes over and over I'm going to do this it's usually in my case going to be about 34 turns quarter turns here until I have the pressure relieved completely from it I just saw the shaft spin a little bit too and that can happen and that's okay yep there it goes every time I making sure that the winding bar is completely seated into the winding cone I'm also making sure to keep my hands totally clear from the winding cone those little set screws can be vicious and I'm also keeping my body and my head out of the line of unwinding it's getting shorter you can see right here there's the indents from the set screws before and I'll show you had to take care of those in just a minute I also noticed that there's less pressure than there was before which is great okay now I got to the point where there's no pressure on this at all and it won't hold in place that means this thing is Unwound and the tension is relieved now we're going to remove the torsion Hardware from the center and these are both mounted to the bracket in the center here there's just two bolts nuts and bolts here to remove I'm going to use my drill my impact driver which I love and then just one socket on the end here or one wrench make it in reverse there we go make sure this is in reverse and then I'll secure it on the right side get that out I'm going to put these on the top of the garage door so we don't lose them and then the same thing on the bottom set okay there we go get rid of that one and then our other bolt as well now on one side or the other you're going to have a bushing there's the bushing there that's only going to be one side and this is what's called an open mouth bracket here so I'm going to use a pair of vice grips clamp this down there we go that this can't slide off while we do the rest of the job with our Center Hardware removed and then with the set screws removed or loosened on the torsioned one on the tension spring that's not broken we're now going to move over to the broken spring and release the tension from the set screws on that and then we can slide each one off in order to take our Springs off we need to remove the drum on the end and this uses that same 3/8 set screw here so we're going to loosen those up go we get the other one there we go okay then we also want to take out our cable this has an end on it that holds it in place so I'm going to take this off and I'm just going to slide it into some of the hardware on the garage door so that doesn't get lost or go free somewhere now with our set screws loose we should be able to pull this down a little bit it might be a little stubborn which this one is I'm going to loosen these as much as I need to here here give that plenty of play there we go now it's moving freely out of the way and here we're going to use our file again and just take care of any rough spots right here where those set screws were digging into the shaft now I'll go do the same thing on the other side and then I'll find my way back here in just a second in order to remove the set screws on this one which is completely untensioned I'm just going to use a 7/16 multi-point socket this is one that's a little bit different it's actually meant for all different types of heads and so it fits on there just perfectly and you can usually use anything that's a multi-point socket anything like that again going to have this in Reverse Seated on there properly okay out goes that one and we can just turn it and loosen that one now this should be able to slide off and what I'm going to do is take care right now of the bar here because I want to use a file and make sure that there's no burs or anything just making sure this is smooth all the way around and we're good and that makes it so that when we put the new one it should be able to slide in place pretty easily and I'll just slide this off towards the end of the bar and we'll do the same thing with the left side now with both sides loosened we can push this one out this direction there we go slide off the drum we can place that right over here for safe keeping and then slide off our Old Spring excellent for now I'm going to slide this back in as we transition the Old Spring off we can now put the new spring on and this is transitioning from step two which is to remove the Old Spring and old torsion Hardware to step three which is to put the new stuff on so I've got the next one lying right here got to remember to put the winding cone on the left side and I'm just going to pop this back out feed it back in like this and then sometimes the tricky part will be getting it through the hole on the end there but hopefully this one will will go fairly smooth let's see it would help if I undid the set screws first I forgot to do that make sure you loosen those all the way before this next step not like what I just did that was my mistake I forgot to do that beforehand so I'm just feeling inside here to where they're past the opening and they are now okay now that the spring is on I can put the drum back on want to make sure to put it with the set screws facing in like so now with the back on I'm going to leave everything loose so that I can now go do the same thing over on the right side now with the opposite side loose I can slide this whole thing out like that take off the Drum store it right here for a moment while I take off the spring okay now I'm going to put on the new spring making sure to loosen up my set screws first be careful not to pinch your fingers here slide that over drum back on with the the set screws facing in and then put it back through the mounting bracket right there now with our second one we can begin to tighten everything down right now and I'm going to line up the marks that I made before right there and that allows us to not have to put new indents in the shaft here tighten these down by hand I'm just going to go until I feel them make contact soon as I start to get some resistance here I'm going to pause and then do the other one okay I've got some resistance there at this point I'm going to do about a half turn on each one one at a time obviously okay there's that one and about a half turn there now I'm going to go back and just do a quarter turn if that maybe it's more of an eighth really there we go so that's in there nice and snug it's just using those same indents that were on there before and we should be all set now I'm going to slide this one our spring over towards the middle making sure not to let the bar slide off okay and I'll go do the same on the left side I almost forgot while I'm up here we need to put the cable back in and it's going to go around the back side find the opening which in my case is currently on top here slide it in make sure it lines up in that first Groove there we go same thing over here we're going to line up our drum okay right there this is also a great spot to use that same 716 multi- Center or multi-point socket if you want to tighten everything up in place here just makes it a little bit quicker there we go trying to do it equally on both set screws and then I'll just do a little more on each one once and we're good I'm going to to slide my spring back towards the center and with both the drums in place then the bar is captive and it's not going to be able to slide off anymore put my cable back in place right in here like so and then wind it up along its track and then yep as I do this we're putting tension on both sides which is great one thing that's going to help a lot with these cables you need to make sure they're both tensioned at the same time and to make sure this one's in place I'm looking down to make sure my other one's in place as well and then I'm going to provide some resistance and then use vice grips to hold that resistance in place and use the header of the garage door there we go so now it can't go anywhere and I've got the proper resistance on both of these as I apply tension to the torsion springs these aren't going to be getting off track or sliding out of their slots at all while I'm over here I'm also going to get a measurement of how far away from my 2x6 here the shaft is so in my case it's about 3 and 1/2 in and from the wall it's about 4 and 1/2 so I'm going to use that measurement to align it on the center where the Center Mount is now that we have our cones in place we're ready to fasten the hardware in the center again I'm going to check to get my shaft right at the 3 and 1/2 in away so that's the same distance that it was on the outer edges so I'll release this here and bring this out a little to about there probably yep and there's my three and 1/2 okay so I'm good there I'm going to use the bushing to bring this whole thing over set it on the bushing I'm going to rotate this to to where the holes for the mounting hardware line up with the slots here and I'm going to have to lift it to get it there which is fine okay I've got all my Hardware right here start by attaching the first piece place and through there we're just going to start hand tight on these and for this we're going to have to lift everything up a smidge and once again I'll get my measurement since I'm in my case it's going to be pretty close to the edge hand tighten and I just realized I should be using power tool TOS here cuz I've got them ens that up really well so I'm also just going to check right here that our bolts that go into the header are nice and secure and everything looks fine there these are great we want to make sure that there's nothing loose anywhere on any of this as far as the hardware is concerned and I think we're in good shape now this is completely optional but if you don't have writing on your Springs themselves sometimes it's helpful to take some chalk like this and then just chalk Mark a line across there that's going to help for counting your turns later on there we go so I've got those on there and I've already got lines on here so that's extra but just something to keep in mind if you don't have lines already on your Springs now we get to wind these things up this is the fun part because this is what makes these work again but just like everything else we're going to have to exercise all the precautions that we talked about before now to get started before we actually wind anything I'm going to mark on the shaft here exactly where that interfac is with the winding cone and we're doing this just to make sure that that gets covered up if these are on in the right direction then as this gets tightened up it will move down the shaft and cover up that line I'll do the same thing on the other side when I get to it and then I'll show you how we can use that to actually stretch the swings a little bit to make it a little safer just in case they're overtightened or under tightened now with that ready to go we've got our winding bars up here I'm making sure to stay clear and we're just going to start winding I'm going to hand tighten this see where it gets to right about there okay I think I can get this first one started right here so so we're going to do this depending on the size of your garage door either 30 or 34 times so if you have a 7t door 30 times is your count I've got an 8ft door so that's going to be 34 so I've got to have both of my winding bars ready I'm steering clear of their path I've got it locked all the way in right up to the marker here and put my second one in that's one two three making sure to seat it properly every time and use this as my guide don't be too quick about this we want to be super careful and then in my case there's five I'm going to go up to 34 6 7 8 now I'll pause right here just so you can see it's actually past the line that I drew so we know we're going in the right direction if you've got these backwards then you're going to notice that it will actually the winding cone will come off after about six turns so that's something to watch out for 8 9 10 11 12 34 so that's that's 34 and I'm fortunate that the set screws are actually facing me that'll make it a little bit easier I'm now going to take my marker this is under tension so I'm going to try not to touch as as little as I can basically I'll touch as little as I can going to make a line about a/4 inch away from where it is now and I'm going to spread the Springs just a little this will make it so that they don't bind up if they're at their Max torsion or tension and it's recommended just as a safety precaution to do this and it's pretty easy to do fortunately as well I'm going to lift it up like this then with my right hand push it over that way there we go so I'm over to my line now this is well seated and I'm ready to tighten down my set screws so I'm going to finger tighten them first just like that and they don't have much to go so that's good okay I'm going to go until they feel snug against the bar right there that should be good now here's the part where we want to be super careful I'm going to remove the winding bar because my set screw should be holding everything going to grab my second winding bar seat it and lift pull out the bottom one and now it's going to start putting tension on my cables I'm just double-checking the drums to make sure the cables are lined up properly on the drums and they are okay so that's holding going to do that very carefully you don't want anything to spin loose if it wasn't tightened down properly at this point I can remove the vice grips that I put on earlier and then move over to the other side now that we've got the vice grips off the top bar we're actually going to relocate them before we do our second spring about 3 in above one of the rollers here just like that what this does is this makes it so that if we overtighten the Springs then it's not going to go past a few inches here this will hopefully help stop it in fact I'm going to tighten that down just a little bit more to make sure it's strong there we go same as before on our other side we're going to go 34 turns very carefully making sure to stay clear same thing on this side we're going to start by marking on the bar just to make sure we're moving in the right direction the fact that we moved in the right direction on that one means this one pretty much has to but we'll just do that to be safe and then we're going to do our 30 34 turns on this as well so there's one three and I'm just counting these every time it clicks the drum here at the top of the garage door four 34 all right so I should be way past my line but I'm going to go ahead and stretch this out that quarter inch again go right up to there and just like before we're going to lift with one hand and tap with the other okay that one doesn't want to move much more than that so that's about all we're going to get I'll take what I can get on this one there we go now while that bar is holding in place I'll fasten down my set screws all right now for the Moment of Truth our Springs are tensioned and we're ready to lift the door and check to see if it's balanced I should be able to lift this by myself easy peasy now what we're looking for is we want to lift this about halfway like this and make sure it stays in place and then it should be be able to lift pretty easily as it goes the rest of the way up yeah that's doing good okay so that moves really nice and easy sorry the picture's probably blown out right now and then I should also be able to pull it down without a ton of resistance so I am in fact going to take one more quarter turn and like I mentioned before that's the most I want to do that'll be a half turn total that I'm removing from this but I'm kind of future proofing this a little bit since I've got Springs that are rated for a few pounds more than my door that way if I want to paint this or put another coat of something to kind of cover all the purple up here then I have that option to do that that'll add a few more pounds but then I can up the tension on this just another quarter turn for example to compensate for that now because this appears to be a little bit too tight in my case we can test this out what we're looking for is the movement of the garage door when it's on its own so as I lift this up I can release the tension there like I mentioned it looks like this one might be a little bit too tight actually these two Springs so we're going to test that just to make sure we're going to do this very carefully that's why we have those vice grips down there to prevent it from going up too much but I'm going to remove the bottom spring and as I let go yeah it's starting to pull up here so it'll hold but it's wanting to pull up a little bit which means we probably have about a quarter turn too much so I'm going to put this one back down lock our winding bar into place right there I'm going to remove these and then release it about a quarter turn tighten them back up I'm going to do the same thing on both sides equally all right again I'm exercising the utmost here the last thing I want to do is get sloppy while I'm making these final adjustments here insert this guy lift up I'm going to let it go down one quarter there we go tighten these back down and even here I'm just kind of really scared kind of cautious about these things spinning if this thing comes loose these things will rip my fingers off so definitely want to be careful here there we go a good grip and good okay so that's our quarter turn on this one we should notice a little bit of a difference right away at least going pull that bottom one out and let go yeah so it's still wanting to lift a little but hardly I think we're in a good spot there I'm going to move over to the next one now a word of caution on this if you have to do more than a half turn so a quarter plus another quarter then that means you've got the wrong Springs on there and you're going to need to get different Springs if you have to go to that 3/4 Mark that's probably too much a quarter to a half turn is about all you should be adjusting these okay same deal here I'm going to relieve that quarter turn just like that all right that feels good right there and just like before we're going to very carefully release this testing it by feel all along the way okay good we're at almost no movement on the door so now we're going to lift this up by pulling on the door this way okay it's staying in place it's not trying to come back up on us so that's a good thing going to go up here now okay and it's stopping at the vice grips that I put in earlier so that's a good thing but as I put it back on the ground it stays on the ground okay so I think we should be good there I'm going to remove the visce grips and we're going to test this out to check for balance on the door no movement on the door okay I think that's where we needed it I think we're in good shape now this is your friend this or something similar to this this is specifically a lubricant made for working with garage doors and you can see on here it's actually rated for pretty much all of the parts it says garage door chain screw drives pivot Points hinges pulley latches locks cables Springs bearings bushings door tracks and chains so this really covers everything that we need here this is not WD40 this is something that's meant specifically for garage doors and I love these cans that they have both kind of like the WD40 cans the regular General spray or you can pop this out and get the more specific version right there so we're going to lube basically all the moving Parts on the garage gar door right now but the one that's kind of interesting is we're going to start up here on the Springs I'm going to use the wider spray on this and I'm not going to spray the last inch or the inside inch I'm just going to get everything but that those outside inches not only that but we're going to actually just rub this all in here you put a little more on okay we're going to rub this all around here and again we're leaving that last inch alone but this will help seal and protect the spring and give it a little bit longer Life we'll do the same thing on the other side okay same thing over here and while we're up here I'm going to spray right inside where we have movement in there it's okay if I let it drip a little I don't want to overdo it but I'd rather get that nice and lubed up um we might as well hit this right here anything that's moving any of these moving Parts here we want to take care of those as best we can now I'm going to go down to the ends and hit the ends where we've got the py with the drums so I'm now hitting this back side where all the movement takes place I don't want to hit it in here that's not the ideal spot but now now I can also get our wheels and any moving Parts like our hinges here I've actually done this on this door not that long ago so that should be in decent shape and then lastly I'll hit the bearings on the outside of this drum and then with that we should be in good shape now with our garage door opener plugged in and then we've got our track that should be about re-engaged here we're going to hit the button and see how it turn turns out aha there we go Springs are working just as they should the balance looks great and because we've lubricated everything it sounds so much better this is nice and quiet and I've got a lot of extra weight with all these panels on here but it handles it beautifully let's make sure it closes just fine as well here it comes looking good all right so awesome we've got a whole playlist of videos for your garage everything from organization to overhead storage you name it I've got a whole bunch of stuff taken care of in this playlist right here so you may want to check that out and remember links to everything I've talked about including all of the tools the merch that I'm wearing all that kind of stuff you can find that all in the description below I'm Nils with learn to Di why thanks for watching

Channel: LRN2DIY

Views: 143,928

Keywords: diy, how-to, lrn2diy

Id: xOXO01rdZ5c

Length: 44min 58sec (2698 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 23 2023