| I hate threads like this because they are often filled with bad information that can be quite dangerous to those who don't have a clue what they are doing. Overhead doors are counter-balanced most often by the use of springs under tension. One type of spring is called a "stretch spring" because as the door closes, the spring stretches and becomes longer. The second type of spring is called a "torsion spring". These springs wind and unwind as the door is lowered or raised. When the door is on the floor, a torsion spring is under maximum tension. There is enough tension in that spring to do serious injury to those who do not know how to adjust these springs. The same holds true for the stretch spring and that is why new doors with stretch springs all have safety wires inside them. Bottom line:.. IF you don't know what you are doing, spend the money to get a PRO. The cost is far less than the doctor's bill and the pain you will go through. In response to a post in this thread about door balance, let me impart the following. When a manufacturer makes a door, all the door sections, along with the rollers, hinges and any other hardware that will be attached to those sections, is put on a scale and weighed. Once the true weight of the complete moving door face is determined, the manufacturer then uses the tables in a very big book to select the correct spring or springs for this door. The length of the spring is critical, as is the diameter of the spring wire used to make the spring along with the inside diameter of the coiled spring. A properly designed door and spring package is the end result. As such, after proper installation of the door and the correct amount of tension being put on the spring/s, the door should behave as follows. The door should sit on the floor with about five pounds of pressure. This means that the door can be opened manually by exerting five pounds of hand pressure. Once the door is being lifted, the door can be stopped anywhere in its travel and stay put. It does not rise nor does it fall. It sits exactly where you stopped it and that can be done no matter if the door is six inches off the floor or two feet or three feet or five feet. When the door is fully raised, it will stop in a position higher than the height of the door frame so that it will not be struck by something entering or exiting the building. The door will not fall back into the opening at all nor will it speed up rapidly as it approaches the end of its travel. All of this is based upon a door that is not binding on the door jambs or binding because the cables are set wrong or binding because the tracks are not plumb or binding because the tracks are installed too close together and are squeezing the rollers together. If you replace the spring/s in your door, you must put the exact same spring/s back. This isn't like horseshoes. Close doesn't count. Choose the wrong spring and the door will not behave properly. An improperly balanced door will put undue strain on your operator and wear it out prematurely. An operator is not a crane. An operator is designed to do exactly what you would want to do if you had to raise the door by hand. In other words, the operator is not supposed to exert any more than five pounds of pressure on the door at any time during its travel. If it does have to exert more than that, then the "pressure sensitivity" controls that govern the maximum "up pressure" and "down pressure" exerted by the operator will be set incorrectly.
Rollers are there to roll. Rollers have bearings in them and they need to be lubed with a lightweight motor oil such as #10. Never, ever lubricate the tracks with anything. Door tracks need to be clean and dry. Lubed tracks attract dirt. Lubed tracks encourage rollers to stop rolling and slide. Rollers that slide on lubed tracks develop flat spots and once that happens, they don't roll anymore. Torsion springs also need to have a light lubrication done to them annually because as the door travels up and down, the coils of the springs rub against each other. Rusty torsion springs result in shorter spring life and jerky operation. Hinges also need a shot of 10 weight oil at the actual hinge points. The shafts of the rollers should be lubed because they need to slide easily, in and out of the hinges as the door goes up and down. Roller shafts that are rusted badly or seized to the hinges, the bottom door brackets or the top brackets will cause binding because they won't allow the roller to run in the sweet spot of the tracks. Stretch spring doors have four cable pulleys with bearings and these bearings must spin freely. Therefore, lube them too. Torsion springs have a shaft running through them and that shaft is supported by end bearing plates and a center bearing plate. Bearings in these plates need to be lubed. All the nuts and bolts that hold the hinges to the sections need to be tight. Loose nuts anywhere on the door or the tracks can create problems while the door is trying to move. Loose track bolts will interfere with the rollers as they try to go by. Tracks that are twisted or dented will also create problems for the rollers. Track assemblies come in two pieces. One is called the "vertical" and the other the "horizontal". The horizontal track has the curved section in it. Look at the spot where the two tracks meet. Are they lined up perfectly? If not, then the rollers will have difficulty travelling through this spot. The wrong hinge number in the wrong place is a problem. Hinges are numbered from 1 to 10. All hinges that do not carry a roller are #1 hinges. Hinges that do carry a roller are installed in sequence starting from the placement of the first hinge. In most cases, the very first hinge (top of the bottom door section) is a #1 hinge. On rare occasions, a #2 hinge is used but that is very rare and almost never on a residential door. If someone puts a #2 hinge where a #1 or #3 hinge should go, this will cause binding issues. Look at the lowest hinge on both sides of the door to make sure they match. The next hinge above should be one number higher and so on. Residential doors normally have either four or five door sections unless the door opening is higher than seven feet. All of this matters because the door tracks are on an angle to the door jambs. As such, numbered hinges must be used because the rollers fit into an offset hole in each hinge. The higher the hinge number, the greater the offset. This system allows the door face to immediately move away from the door seals the second the door is lifted so that the door face does not rub against those seals as it rises. When the door is being closed, the door face does not rub against those same outer seals (also called door stops) on the way down. The door contacts those seals at the last possible moment. Sorry for the long post but if you guys are going to mess around with your doors, you should have some idea as to what to look for and what to look out for in the form of dangers. I have had torsion springs shatter on me as I tried to put more tension on them. Pieces of sharp spring wire flying at you at high speed is scary. I have had cast aluminum spring cones let go too and pieces of them have come my way. I ran my own door servicing company for twenty odd years and worked as a serviceman for ten years prior to that. If you absolutely must adjust your own torsion springs, then make yourself a proper pair of winding bars that easily slide into the holes in the winding cones to full depth. But the bar diameter should not be more than an eighth of an inch smaller than the hole diameter. The bars should have a bit of wiggle room but should not be on an angle to the hole in the winding cone. Never, ever, ever, let go of a winding bar once it has been inserted into a winding cone. If the spring breaks or the cone breaks, that bar can spin around and smash your skull in. Always tighten both set screws securely before taking your hand off a winding bar. If a door has a single torsion spring, then you must secure the spring shaft against the door jamb with a pair of round-jaw visegrip pliers to keep it from rotating as you wind the spring. Springs are always wound with the door on the floor. As a spring is wound, the overall length of the spring will increase by the diameter of the wire used to create the spring. So, if a spring is made from .250 wire, the spring will increase in length by 1/4" with each turn. If it takes ten full winds on a spring to reach the correct balance for the door, then the fully wound spring will be 10 quarters or 2 1/2" longer than it was before any tension was added. Putting winds on the spring with the door in the air can be done but you must stretch the spring out in order to keep it from binding on itself as the door is closed. There are other issues that concern the cables and the cable drums but I won't go into them here. Hopefully, the OP can sort out his problems by carefully reading the above and some of you other guys will learn something too.
Cheers. | 
