One corner high, the other dropped

Why is my garage door crooked on one side?

Two cables carry the door, one at each bottom corner, and they share the lift exactly. When one of them stops pulling, the other side keeps rising and the freed side drops. The result is the door you are looking at now. One bottom corner an inch or a foot higher than the other, the top edge tilted in the opening, and very likely a length of cable hanging loose near the top on the low side.

The high side is the one still carrying its corner. The low side is the one that let go. It matters because the high side is now holding the whole door on a single cable, and that corner is the one nobody should stand under or tug on.

Three things worth noting, all from a safe distance:

• Which corner is low, driver’s side or passenger side as you face the door from the driveway.
• Where the slack cable is. Draped over the door in a loose coil, hanging straight down beside the track, or lying on the floor. If you can see its loose end from the driveway, note whether it is frayed and brown or clean.
• Whether the door moved at all after it went crooked, or whether it jammed part way and stopped.

Is it the spring or the cable?

On a torsion-spring door, the kind with the coil on a shaft above the opening, a broken spring makes the door heavy on both sides at once. The spring drives both cable drums through one shaft, so when it breaks, both sides lose their lift together and the door stays level. It will not lift, but it hangs square. Look up at the shaft. A broken spring shows a clean two-inch gap in the coil, and that is the spring repair page.

A crooked torsion door with no gap in the coil is a cable. The spring is still wound and still pulling, and one drum is turning with nothing on it.

Older Greenfield garages are the exception worth knowing. A lot of them still run extension springs, the long springs stretched along the horizontal tracks, one per side. Each side has its own spring, so on those doors a broken spring does make the door climb crooked. Look along the track on the low side for a spring with a gap in it or a spring on the floor. Either way the door gets the same visit, so the distinction changes what goes on the truck more than what you do next.

Why did only one cable break?

Both cables went in the same day and have lifted the same door the same number of times, so why did only one quit? Almost every crooked door in the county traces back to one of these.

The bottom bracket rusted on one side. The cable anchors in a loop at the bottom bracket, an inch or two off the slab, and a garage floor is rarely level. Meltwater and drip off the car run to one corner and sit there. That corner’s loop sits wet all winter while the other dries out, and the wet one goes first, strand by strand. If the loose cable is frayed and brown at the very end, this is your story.

A drum slipped. The cable winds onto a grooved drum at the top of each side, and the drum is fixed to the shaft with set screws. If one set screw works loose, that drum turns a hair behind the shaft, the cable spools unevenly, jumps a groove, and unwinds in a tangle. A loose cable with no fraying and a bird’s nest at the top usually means the drum, and the cable itself may be fine.

The door hit something once. A door set down on a rake handle, or a bumper that nudged the bottom section. Out here on the county’s bigger lots the zero-turn is the usual suspect, and the driver rarely mentions it until the tech asks. The door stops moving for a moment, the opener keeps pulling, the drum on that side keeps turning, and the cable comes off it. Often the cable is fine and the door is still crooked.

Can I fix a garage door cable myself?

This is where a crooked door looks more fixable than it is. A loose cable looks like something you wind back on by hand. The trouble is what the cable is attached to.

The drums sit on the spring shaft, and the spring is still fully wound. It did not break. It is holding all of its stored force right now, and that force is running through the one cable that still works. Getting the loose cable back on its drum means unwinding the spring with winding bars, setting the door level, re-seating both cables, and winding the spring back up. The bottom bracket on the good side is anchoring the entire load through one cable, and the two bolts holding it are the last bolts on the door anyone should loosen.

There is no version of this job that does not involve a loaded torsion spring. That is why it stays a pro job even when the cable is undamaged, and the same reason applies to the spring itself.

What is safe to do: look, photograph, unplug the opener so nobody hits the remote from the car, and leave the slack cable exactly where it is. Where it lies tells the tech what shifted.

What does a garage door cable repair visit include?

A crooked door gets fixed in one visit almost every time, in the same order regardless of which cause put it there.

1. The door is leveled and clamped in the track so it cannot move while the spring is unloaded.
2. The spring tension comes off with winding bars.
3. Both cables come off and get replaced as a pair. The cost page lists cable replacement at $110 - $200 for the pair, done with any spring job at little extra. The twin of a frayed cable has the same mileage, and the second one is a parts difference.
4. Drums get checked and re-set, set screws snugged, and if the drum slipped that is the actual fix.
5. The spring is rewound and the door balanced so it stays put at waist height by hand.
6. Rollers, hinges, and the bottom brackets get a look while everything is apart.

Two things can add to that. If rollers left the rail, the track gets straightened and the door re-hung, which the cost page lists at $150 - $350 as an off-track re-hang. And if the spring is close to the end of its life, the tech will say so while the winding bars are already out. Standard springs are rated ~10,000 open-close cycles, and a pair runs $220 to $400 installed. You hear that number and choose.

Most of these calls finish in about an hour.

When a crooked door is an emergency

A door crooked but closed, in a garage with nothing trapped, can wait for the next regular slot at the regular rate. Two versions cannot.

A door crooked and stuck open, with evening coming and the house open behind it, goes to the front of the line. So does a car trapped behind a door jammed part way up before a shift. Both are emergency calls, and the priority fee gets said on the phone before anyone drives. Describing the door costs nothing, and which corner dropped sorts your call into one line or the other. That one detail is usually enough for a real price at (317) 526-4415.

One thing not to do while you wait. Do not pull the red release cord on a door that is crooked and part way up. The cord disconnects the opener, and right now the opener may be the only thing holding a 150-pound door where it is.