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Garage Door Cable Replacement

The garage door cable is one of the most important parts of the system. It helps to reduce tension from torsion or extension springs, hence increasing the number of life cycles. Proper garage door cable can reduce noise and make your garage door operation smooth.

Despite the fact of garage door cables may have varied length, thickness or number of strands, there are only three types of the cables are mostly used in the industry: safety cables, torsion spring cables, and extension spring cables.

Safety cables are used to ensure additional safety for the extension spring system. They prevent fail of the garage door if the extension spring fails. Usually, the safety cables go through each extension spring and connect to the mounting skeleton from one side and to the bracket from another side.

Commonly the safety cables have diameters of 1/8-inch or 3/32-inch. 3/32-inch cable gives you more flexibility during installation. It is customary to assume, that for standard residential garage door, the safety cable length should be 24-inch longer than the door height. That means, that for the seven-foot door it is better to use 9 feet cable and 10 feet cable suitable for the eight-foot garage door.

Torsion spring cables are used to help the torsion spring to lift the door and pull it down. Typically, it is the most likely to break garage door cable. The reason for that is simple – the spring cable takes over the entire weight load of the garage door, and this load may be up to 1,950 pounds for the 7x19 strand 1/8-inch thickness cable and 1,650 pounds for the 7x7 strand 1/8-inch thickness cable. The 7x19 strand cable type is one of the strongest on the market. Another equally popular representative of the torsion spring cable family is a 7x7 strand 1/8-inch thickness cable. This type is much noisier than 7x19 strand torsion spring cable and has less flexible.

The only real contestant of the 1/8-inch cables on the market is 3/32-inch torsion spring garage door cables. These cables can provide homeowners with the almost noiseless operation of the garage doors with this type of torsion spring cables. The main and probably the only disadvantage of these cables is the entire weight load which is mostly 950 pounds. But even this weight load is enough to be able to perform the tasked function.

Extension spring cables are used to help extension spring to move the garage door up and pull it down. Typically supplies with the 3/32-inch diameter and weight capacity of 950 pounds, but some newer cables come with 1/8-inch diameter and 1950 pounds capacity. It’s an upgrade from the previous version of the extension spring cable. The upgraded cables provide you with great noise reduction and flexibility.

The main issue may cause by broken extension spring cable is that in this case spring will not be able to perform its key purpose – lift the door up by extension spring compression and pull the garage door down by extension.

You should never forget that when the door is in the down position or operating, the extension garage door springs are in the highest strain, hence, in the most dangerous condition. And the only mechanisms keep all this system from fault are extension spring and safety cables.

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