What It Costs
A straight cable replacement on a Colfax garage door runs less than a spring job, since the cable itself is a cheap part and the labor is mostly about doing the tension correctly on both sides. What changes the number is condition of everything around the cable. Colfax's housing stock centers on 1983, which means a lot of doors out here are still running their original galvanized aircraft cable and the factory drum it was wound on - over forty years of thermal cycling and the stock stretches, frays at the drum groove, or just gives out at the bottom bracket. If the drum has worn a groove the cable keeps jumping out of, replacing the cable alone is a temporary fix and we'll say so rather than charge you twice. We don't quote a number sight unseen, since a frayed cable on a door with a rusted track costs more to sort out than a clean snap on a door that's otherwise been maintained.
What Is on the Truck
We carry cable in the diameters and lengths that match extension and torsion setups from the 1970s and 1980s, since that's what's on most doors between here and Grass Valley. For Colfax specifically that means standard 7x19 aircraft cable in the stock lengths for a 7-foot and 8-foot door, replacement drums when the groove is worn past saving, and bottom brackets, since the bracket the cable loops through is often as tired as the cable. We also bring galvanized hardware rather than plain steel, which matters in this part of the foothills where mild winters still bring enough damp and occasional freeze to work plain steel into surface rust over a few decades.
What Causes It Around Here
The mild climate with occasional freeze that covers this whole service area doesn't snap cables on its own, but it does let rust creep in slowly at the drum and bottom bracket over the decades, and rust is what eventually lets a cable fray and let go under tension. With Colfax's housing centered on 1983, most doors are old enough that this slow wear has had time to do real damage even without a dramatic event. The other common cause is a door that's gone off-track and pinched a cable against the frame - usually from a worn roller or a bent track rather than the cable itself failing.
The Complications
A broken cable on one side of a door almost always means the other side's cable, drum, and bottom bracket are the same age and under the same strain, so we check both even if only one let go. If the door jumped track when the cable broke, there can be dents in the panel or a bent track section that needs straightening or replacing before the door will run true again. On a handful of Colfax homes we've seen original torsion springs still paired with this original cable and hardware - at that age we'll tell you plainly if the spring is close enough to its own end of life that it makes more sense to do both now than pay for a truck trip again in a year.
