Lubricating 9x7 Garage Doors

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If you have coil springs it's very important to keep them well oiled. Anything is better than nothing. Without lube, especially in humid climates, the coils can rust. This can prevent the coils from uniformly sliding against each other when they are loading and unloading tension. This will in turn cause one section of the spring to load up with more tension than the rest. This can result in premature spring failure.

By keeping the spring clean and wet with oil, grease, silicone lubricant, or any combination of the above, the individual coils can slide freely against each other, and distribute the load on the spring evenly throughout it's entire length. (Or evenly through both springs on a dual spring system). If you ever hear your coil garage door springs making noises as the door is opening or closing, it's all but a sure bet the springs are dry, and in need of lubrication.

I've had coil garage door springs let go, and when they do it sounds like a 12 gauge shotgun going off. They will always break when they're closed. That's when they're under the greatest tension.
 
Just read my garage door literature, it specifically wants a 30wt for the chain.
 
Another thing that is good to do if you have an automatic garage door opener. Is once a month pull the release rope, and disconnect the opener from the door. Then raise and lower the door manually up and down through it's full operating range. If your spring tension is adjusted properly you should be able to do this easily with one hand. It shouldn't bind, or become difficult anywhere along it's track when moving it fully up to fully down.

If it does bind up, or is difficult to move, stop and find out what's wrong. You can't tell this by running the door up and down with the opener. It's amazing how few people actually do this. Most just run their units until something breaks. The guy who installed my new opener and rollers, said over half of the problems he services could easily be eliminated if people just checked their doors manually once and a while. Instead of running them until something fails.
 
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