Springs, cables, rollers, track and seals, repaired on your own driveway anywhere from Lower Lonsdale out to Horseshoe Bay. Rollers, cable, seal and spring all ride on the van; the spring is matched to the weight of your own door before it goes on, because one set to the wrong tension will not balance the door and will not last. The job is not finished until the door lands flat and locks down.
The mechanism that moves the door rather than the lock bolted to it. On this coast it is the weather and the ground under the driveway that wear it out, not the number of times anyone presses the button.
The van that turns up is a locksmith's van, and that shows at the end of the job rather than during it. The mechanical work is identical whoever carries it out. What differs is where the line for finished gets drawn: not a door that travels again, but a door that lands flat along its whole width with the bolt driving properly once it is down. An opening with daylight under the bottom rail has not been secured, whatever the opener reports. Hardware for that side of it sits on the garage door lock page. This page is about the parts carrying the weight.
One thing is worth settling before anyone is dispatched. Where the vehicle door at your address is a shared parkade gate rather than your own garage door, it is the building's equipment and the go-ahead comes from the strata council or the manager rather than from a resident standing outside it. Our opener and gate page sets out exactly where that line falls. Everything below assumes a door that belongs to you.
Most of the doors we get called to were hung with the house. The post-war bungalows on Dempsey Road in Lynn Valley, the wood-frame single-family and townhome stock around Berkley Road and Holt Road in Seymour built from the 1970s through the 1990s, the 1950s and early-1960s bungalows around Norgate Avenue, and the post-war ranchers on Stevens Drive in Pemberton Heights are all in that bracket. On hardware of that age nothing goes in one movement. What reaches us is a door that has been quietly losing its geometry for years: a roller worn out of round that drags instead of rolling, a slack hinge letting one section lead the one below it, and a cable shedding a few strands at a time in the one spot nobody ever looks at, which is the drum up at the top of the vertical rail. The bottom seal goes at its own pace and is the only part of it most people notice, because that is the part where water turns up. Every one of those is a wearing part hanging off sections that are usually still square underneath, which is what keeps this in the realm of a service call rather than a new door.
The Berkley construction adds one of its own. In wood frame built to that era the lag bolts holding the horizontal track up into the framing back out slowly over thirty or forty years, and a rail that has dropped a few millimetres at its back end is how a roller eventually finds its way out. Re-seating the roller without dealing with the fixings behind it buys a few months. It is worth mentioning on the call if the door has come off more than once, because that history usually points at the framing rather than at the door.
Salt takes garage hardware out of service faster than rain does, and it goes for the components under load. A lift cable spends its working life winding onto a drum, and the stretch that corrodes is the stretch carrying the door. Rollers seize in their bearings until the sections start dragging on the rail. A spring pits, and a pitted spring breaks at the pit rather than somewhere convenient. The addresses that meet this first are the ones with water on the doorstep: the Dollarton waterfront in Seymour, Gallant Avenue and the streets climbing Panorama Drive in Deep Cove, the Eagle Harbour end of Caulfeild, and the houses stepping up from the cove at Horseshoe Bay, where Howe Sound works on every piece of outdoor steel all year. Sealed rollers, cable rated for that exposure and a lubricant that stays where it is put through a wet winter are the difference between a service every couple of years and a cable letting go on one side.
Upper Lonsdale above 21st Street, the streets around Jones Avenue, Grand Boulevard and Balfour Avenue, and the Edgemont plateau all sit high enough to get genuinely cold and snowy while the waterfront is merely wet. Cold does two things to a garage door and neither announces itself. It thickens whatever grease is left in the rollers and bearings, so a mechanism already overdue for a service crosses from stiff to stuck on the first hard morning below zero. And it lands at the worst possible moment for a spring that has spent a year quietly shedding tension, because the door is at its heaviest and the motor is pulling hardest exactly when nobody wants to be out on the driveway working out why. A door that has become noticeably harder work across the autumn is one to have looked at before January instead of during it.
Grade decides more about a garage door than people expect, and it decides it at the bottom rail. An apron that slopes in aims every wet month straight at the seal, and the seal loses that argument eventually. The steeper Prospect Road addresses in Pemberton Heights, the crescents climbing away from the cove above Horseshoe Bay and the residential streets winding up toward Caulfeild Drive are all places where the ground in front of the door is doing something other than sitting flat. Where a slab has settled, or was poured to drain toward the garage in the first place, a new bottom seal will not solve it by itself, because the gap it has to bridge is a different width at each end of the opening. What holds in that case is a threshold seal bonded to the floor, rising to meet the door rather than waiting for the door to come down to it. The grade gets called at the opening, in front of you, before any part comes off the van.
The large-lot stock changes the repair rather than only the address. Caulfeild runs to four and five bedroom detached houses on generous lots, Capilano has character single-family on big treed lots backing onto the river canyon, and the British Properties is almost entirely large detached, so on those streets a double opening is the norm rather than the exception. A double is not a wider single. It hangs roughly twice the weight off the same shaft, which means both springs are renewed together whether one or both have failed, both cables come off and go back matched, and the check at the end stops being a formality and becomes the actual test of the work. Put a double back on its rail without matching what carries it and you get a door that runs, drifts out of square over the following months, and books itself a second visit. That is the reason the next question after what the door is doing is whether the opening is a single or a double.
The spring is the part holding the weight of the door, and it holds it as stored tension in wound steel that gives no notice at all before releasing it. This is the one item on the page that should never be tackled at home. It takes winding bars, clamps, and a tension figure worked out from what your particular door weighs, and getting that wrong injures people. Three symptoms are worth a same-day call: a door that will not rise at all, a door that has gone from manageable by hand to nearly immovable inside a week, and a single flat report from the garage after which nothing works. In each of those, leave the door down. The costly version is the one where the opener gets used to force it up afterwards, because the motor is then hauling a load it was never rated for and tends to fail second.
| Repair | Typical range |
|---|---|
| Track realignment / off-track reset | $120–$260 |
| Roller replacement (full set) | $90–$220 |
| Lift cable replacement (pair) | $110–$240 |
| Torsion spring replacement (single) | $180–$340 |
| Torsion spring replacement (pair) | $260–$480 |
| Panel / section repair or replacement | $180–$500+ |
| Weather seal & bottom-seal replacement | $80–$180 |
| Tune-up, balance & lubrication service | $90–$160 |
Each band covers the part itself, the labour, and the adjustment once it is in. Weight is what moves a job up its range: an insulated double takes considerably more spring than a bare single does, and the parts get priced accordingly. Nothing in those figures moves because of where the address sits. Describe the fault and the door in a sentence each and you get a figure on the call rather than a range.
Will not rise, sitting off its rail, one loud bang and then silence, water tracking in underneath. Add whether the opening is a single or a double and roughly what decade the house belongs to. That is normally enough to put a price on the visit before anyone is dispatched.
Say so up front, because it reorders the visit. A vehicle trapped behind a door with a broken spring comes out on the manual release before anything is unbolted, and on a driveway with any grade on it that is a controlled two-person move rather than a shove. If the door still travels at all, we will tell you on the call whether to run it once more or leave it alone.
The last thing done is the test that decides whether the repair worked. Off the opener, up by hand to the halfway point, then hands away. A balanced door stays where it was left. One that climbs or sinks is still wrong regardless of what was replaced. The bolt is tried with the door right down, and you watch both before the invoice.
A garage door fault can arrive with a house lockout or a worn front-door cylinder behind it. Both get handled on the one visit.