We’re in Wharton New Jersey with a bit of a dangerous one today. We found a broken garage door back hang that was made with cheaper thinner steel that had snapped due to the pressure of the extension spring running from the steel to the front of the door. It caused this back hang to snap apart at the stop bolt in the backtrack.
Garage door back hangs are made of steel angle iron and go from the end of the garage door track to the ceiling to support the backtracks when the door is open. They typically have another piece on the ceiling lagged into the supports for the garage ceiling and a brace or “kicker” going from the down piece to the ceiling piece.
The first step in fixing this is to lift the door up and get the tension off the spring. The spring is hot and fully extended which is very dangerous. We added a piece of new steel running from the back of the track up to the ceiling piece so that when I lift the door up it will be supported.
Once we have the door supported we can lift it up and then begin taking apart the old back hang and releasing the spring and cables so we can safely make a new back hang and reinstall the spring. We decided to change the entire back hang the ceiling piece kicker and the down piece.
Once that was replaced we were then able to reinstall the spring and cables and get the door back to operating. We ran the door a few times to test that it is going nice and smooth. Now our customer has a safe and properly functioning door again.