Deadly toys…
About two weeks ago Iza called me in the middle of the Saturday with scared voice – “something just exploded in our house!”. After I calmed down her and came home from shopping we carefully examined whole house and found nothing. It took me over a week to realize that it was one of our garage door‘s torsion springs that broke. I found this out because our door stopped working and I tried to check what is wrong with them.
There is nothing around the house what I’m unable to do (well, almost nothing but now we are talking about maintenance) so I started to search the internet for some how-to’s related to this topic. And all what I was able to figure out is that everybody are extremely scared about even thinking of replacing torsion springs. To cite one of them:
WARNING! Torsion spring replacement is dangerous work, even for experienced tradesmen! Torsion springs are normally under extreme tension. Damage to property and loss of fingers, limbs and life can occur
So I started to think – ok, maybe it’s time to hire a contractor. So I took phonebook, found a company which trucks are passing me by all the time (they are located just around the corner) and asked them for the price. After a while, when I recovered from the shock I started to think – “Mr.s Korwel, you are intelligent man, you can do this and survive.”
After some further search I’ve found a company – DDM Garage Doors which not only wanted to sell me those springs, but also have great installation instruction on their page.
As they are located in Chicago, spring were here in less that 24h. I won’t post here detailed instruction how to do this as their manual is more then detailed. Installation took me 1.5h and $8 for one special tool I didn’t have in my garage yet – 1/2″ by 4″ steel bar.
Now, if I ever need a job which pays more than $100/h (considering from what they wanted to charge me) I’ll open my own garage door fixing business.
Technorati Tags: garage door, torsion springs, dangerous work
