Can You Do This Yourself
A snapped cable on a torsion or extension system means the door is under spring tension even when it looks slack - that's not a DIY repair, full stop, regardless of how simple the fix looks. Winding a new cable onto a loaded drum without the right bars and clamps is how people lose fingers or get hit by a door panel.
What you can safely check yourself: whether the cable is frayed at one end (near the bottom bracket) versus snapped mid-run, and whether the door came down crooked or jammed square. Take a photo before you call - it saves a diagnostic trip. If the door is a 1960s-era single-piece wood or early steel door rather than a modern sectional, tell us that up front too, since the cable routing on those differs from anything built after the 1980s.
The Cost of This Job
We don't quote a flat number here because cable jobs split into two very different repairs: a straight cable swap on one side, and a job where the drum, the bottom bracket, or the opposite-side cable also needs replacing because it's the same age and about to fail anyway. Carson's median household income sits at $107,391, well above the wider service area's $83,538 - which doesn't change what the part costs, but it does mean more owners here choose to replace both cables and the drums at once rather than get called back for the second side in a year. That's a judgment call we'll walk you through on site, not a hard sell over the phone.
What Is on the Truck
We carry cable stock in the lengths that match both older single-piece doors and the sectional doors more common in newer builds, along with replacement drums and bottom brackets, since those wear alongside the cable on a door this age. We don't stock every spring size for every door on the truck - high-cycle and oversized commercial springs sometimes mean a second trip. On a standard residential cable job in Carson, we're set up to finish it in one visit.
