Garage Door Cable Repair for Larkspur Homes

Parts We Carry

The drive from San Rafael to Larkspur is three miles, which matters more than it sounds like it should. It's short enough that we load the truck before we leave rather than guessing on site, and long enough that we plan the cable stock around what Larkspur actually has in its garages rather than a generic kit. Larkspur's housing mostly went up between 1960 and 1996, with the median build year sitting around 1971. That puts most doors here on torsion spring systems with drums and cable drums sized for mid-century double and single doors, not the older extension-spring setups you still see in pre-1950s housing stock elsewhere in the service area. We carry galvanized aircraft cable in the diameters and lengths that match those torsion drums, plus the clips and drum-set hardware that wears out alongside the cable itself. The region sits in a mild temperate climate, so we're not fighting salt-air corrosion the way a coastal shop might - what eats these cables in Larkspur is mostly cycle count and age, not weather. We don't carry every obscure drum size on the truck; if a door turns out to have a less common aftermarket track system, that part sometimes needs to be ordered rather than installed same visit.

Can You Do This Yourself

A garage door cable under tension is not a weekend project, and this isn't a scare tactic - it's physics. The cable runs from the bottom bracket up to a drum that's being held under load by a torsion spring, and if that cable snaps or comes off the drum while someone's working near it, the door can drop or the bar can whip. Given that Larkspur's door stock skews toward 1960s-80s torsion systems rather than simpler consumer-grade extension springs, the spring tension on these doors tends to be higher, not lower, which raises the stakes if you're loosening set screws without knowing what you're doing. If the cable has simply come off the drum but isn't frayed or snapped, that's sometimes a fix a careful homeowner can do with the door fully down and the opener disconnected. If the cable is frayed, kinked, or already broken, that's a call, not a project. We're not going to pretend there's a shortcut here just to sound helpful.

How We Fix It

We start by checking why the cable failed, not just replacing it, because on a door built around the 1971 median year for this area, a snapped cable is often the second failure, not the first. Usually the drum or the roller it rides on has worn unevenly and started chewing into the cable over months before it finally gives. We release the spring tension safely, pull the old cable and inspect the drum, bottom bracket, and track alignment on both sides of the door. If the drum shows wear, we replace it along with the cable rather than putting new cable on an edge that's already cut into. We re-cable both sides even if only one side failed, since the other side is carrying the same age and cycle count and is close behind. Once it's re-cabled we balance the door by hand before testing it on the opener, because a door that isn't balanced will just go back to wearing the new cable the same way it wore the old one. Most of this is done in one visit; drum replacement on less common track hardware is the exception noted above.

Where This Job Goes Sideways

A cable call in Larkspur sometimes turns into more than a cable call once we're inside the garage. With median household income in the area at $134,744 - close to but under the wider service area's $137,006 - a fair number of these doors were kept running on original hardware longer than they might have been in a higher-turnover market, which means the cable is rarely the only tired part. We'll find a torsion spring near the end of its cycle life, a bent track from years of a misaligned roller, or an opener straining to lift a door that's no longer balanced because of that same worn cable. We tell you what we see and price it separately rather than bundling it into the cable job, because not every household wants or needs all of it done the same day. The one thing we won't do is re-cable a door and send you on your way if the spring underneath it is clearly about to go next - that's not a repair, that's a second call waiting to happen.

Frequently asked questions