Doing It Yourself
A garage door spring is wound under enough tension to snap a wrist bone or put a gouge in your windshield if it lets go wrong.
Spring visual check only
We're not going to walk you through replacing one, and any guide that does is leaving out the part where the tool slips. What you can safely do yourself: look at the spring above the door. If it's one solid coil that's separated into two pieces with a gap between them, that's a broken torsion spring, and you have your answer.
Single spring from the 1970s
You can also check whether your door has one spring or two - doors built in the early 1970s in this area often shipped with a single spring sized for a lighter door, which is part of why they fail the way they do now. Lifting the door by hand with the opener disconnected tells you a lot too.
Dead-weight drop means call
If it drops like dead weight instead of staying roughly where you put it, the spring is gone or close to it. Past that, call it in. Winding tension back into a spring with the wrong tools, on hardware that's older than the house's roof shingles, is not a weekend project worth the trade.
How to Book
We cover Hollywood Park out of our Boerne shop, about 19 miles up the road. Call and describe what you're seeing - a door that won't budge, a loud bang followed by the door refusing to open, or a spring you can see has split. We'll ask the make and rough age of the door, since original hardware from a 1972-built house needs different parts than something installed in a remodel. Spring stock for older torsion setups isn't always on the truck for every size; if yours is a less common diameter we may need to confirm it before we load up. There's a page with more on what we do across Hollywood Park generally, and our spring repair details for the Boerne side of the service area are on this page.
The Symptom
The door won't open, the opener motor hums or clicks but the door doesn't move, or it opens a few inches and stalls. Sometimes there's a loud bang from the garage first - that's the spring letting go, not the opener failing. In a lot of Hollywood Park homes, where the median year built sits at 1972, that bang is coming from a spring that's been doing the job since the house was new or close to it. Nobody replaces a torsion spring on a schedule; they replace it when it breaks, which means a spring that's been flexing for fifty years finally runs out of cycles. If the door is heavy to lift by hand once you've pulled the release cord, that's the same failure - the spring isn't carrying its share of the door's weight anymore.
What Is on the Truck
Standard torsion springs in common sizes, the safety cables that keep a broken spring from whipping loose, and the winding bars and clamps to do the swap correctly.
Drum and shaft bearings
For a 1972-era door we're also checking the drum and shaft, since original hardware that's never been touched tends to have wear in the bearings that a spring-only fix won't solve.
Track and hinges left behind
If your garage still has the door it was built with, odds are good the springs have been swapped at least once by now just from age, but the track, hinges, and rollers behind them often haven't - that's the part that surprises people.
Discontinued opener and panels
We carry common roller and hinge stock for that reason, not just springs. What we don't always carry is a replacement for a long-discontinued opener or a door panel from a manufacturer that stopped making that model decades ago; those can mean a short wait on parts.
Why It Happens Here
Hollywood Park's housing is older than a lot of what we see across the broader service area - a median build year of 1972 means a meaningful share of these garages have never had the torsion hardware touched beyond a spring swap, if that. Add the region's mild climate with occasional freezes, and the metal doesn't get the thermal cycling that wrecks springs faster in harsher climates, but it does mean a spring here can run thirty, forty years on the original install before it finally fatigues and breaks rather than failing early. That's not a problem until it is - the spring holds right up until it doesn't, so there's rarely a slow warning period. With household income in Hollywood Park running higher than much of the surrounding area, we also see a fair number of upgraded openers bolted onto original 1970s door hardware, which is its own mismatch worth a look while we're there.
What Can Go Wrong
Replacing just the spring on a door that's original to a 1972 build sometimes uncovers a second problem once the door's weight is correctly balanced again - a cable that was holding together under slack tension, a worn drum, or a track that's slightly out of alignment and only showed it once the spring quit compensating. We'll tell you if we see that rather than just swapping the spring and leaving. On the other side, if the door itself is original from the build year and the panels are rusted or the seams have separated, a spring repair buys you time but doesn't fix a door that's past its service life - at that point replacement is the honest call, not another repair. We'd rather say that upfront than have you pay for a spring on a door that needs to come out in a year anyway.
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