Where This Job Goes Sideways
The failure mode we see tied to this housing stock is a cable that's frayed at the drum for months before it finally lets go, and nobody notices because the door still opens - just a little crooked, a little louder. By the time it snaps, the opposite cable is usually close behind, because both have the same age and the same wear. Fix one side only and you're back out here in a few weeks for the other. On a lot of Fraser's original hardware, the drums themselves have worn grooves from decades of the same cable path, so a new cable on an old grooved drum can jump track again within days. That's the part that turns a cable call into a drum-and-cable job, which costs more than the cable alone. Cold is the other factor - stiff, brittle cable strands in a severe winter climate crack rather than stretch, and a door that's been fighting a frozen track all January is more likely to finish the job on the cable. We'd rather tell you that up front than quote a cable-only price and surprise you later.
Getting It Booked In
We run this job out of Bay City, and Fraser sits about 14 miles out, so we're not a same-hour drop-in - we build the trip into the day's route rather than treating it as a quick errand. When you call, tell us whether the door is stuck down, stuck up, or sagging to one side; that alone tells us whether to bring a matched pair of cables or just the one. If you can get a clear look at the drum without reaching near the spring, a photo helps us bring the right parts the first trip instead of a second one. We don't keep a branch or a stock room in Fraser itself, so the parts that come with us are whatever's loaded on the truck that morning - common extension-spring cable sizes, yes, anything unusual, maybe not on the first visit.
The Symptom
A cable problem on a Fraser garage door usually shows up as a door that hangs crooked, like one side didn't come up as far as the other, or a loud pop followed by the door refusing to budge. Sometimes it's quieter than that - a slow sag over a week or two as a frayed cable stretches before it finally gives. If the door came down fast and uneven, or you can see a cable curled loose near the bottom bracket instead of wound tight on the drum, that's a cable, not a spring, and not an opener problem. Don't force the door by hand past that point. With about 1,404 households in Fraser, most on original or near-original hardware from the 1960s build era, this is a repair we see a predictable version of - just not one we can price sight unseen.
