Summer 2019 - My garage door has been a problem or years. First of all, it's OLD. Decades old. While the tracks are still working, the springs are shot as you can see:

They both looked like this (left). We had long ago disconnected the automatic opener, as these springs overwhelmed it (the opener died trying to deal with the springs). We would then park the car on the garage apron and laboriously go inside through the side door and manually open it...and it took some Strength! To the point where we wondered if we'd continue to be able to open the door (I'm 63, my brother's 66). It was REALLY difficult to lift that door!

Maybe 2 or 3 weeks ago I was pulling the car out of the garage and went in to close the door...I closed it and heard a super loud noise...briefly thought it was collapsing on me, then when I looked it turns out that the cable on one side had snapped. Damned! No parking in the garage that night!

We both did a lot of internet reading over the next week. It might be a good time to replace the springs but A. it scared the hell out of me, garage springs could kill you and B. you had to know the weight of your door to order the right springs. We measured the door weight with a bathroom scale (the approved method) but it registered 183 pounds, which seemed wrong. Turns out I needed to remove the up-force of the remaining spring to get a true reading. I used a vice grip to immobilize the remaining cable so as to remove the spring force from it and did the weight thing again with the bathroom scale: 243 pounds! Not surprising in retrospect given how hard it was to raise it. It's made of steel and this confirms that it's super heavy. I don't think they make them this heavy any more. But this door's probably 60 years old.

I found this on eBay:

Even with $26.25 shipping it seemed far better than replacing the whole door so I ordered a couple of them. These are the 240 pound pull springs (120 pounds per spring). They look like this right out of the box:

They looked smaller compared to what was installed out there, even in diameter. I hope these are indeed 240 pound pull springs!

One Friday we started to replace the springs...started around noon, and the first step was to raise the door. Because of the loss of one spring this was not trivial and required a lot of grunting and effort to get it up. Once up, we followed directions of several internet sites and used clamps with a  block of wood to clamp the door open to prevent it from inadvertently falling (on us!):

With the clamps in place, we removed the springs (which wasn't difficult as there's little or no tension with the door fully up).

They are both quite failed:

And yes I was right, the new ones are narrower in diameter. Hope these are the right ones!

 Before doing anything else I had some reinforcement to do....turns out, the springs had messed up the garage over the years!

PAGE TWO OF THE SPRINGS SAGA