There are various reasons why a garage entryway could fall off its tracks and hit the ground. By understanding what could cause such an occasion, it will help you remain cautious for any future issues that could emerge – and help you understand the repair process.
Let’s get straight to the point: a garage entryway that falls off its tracks is very unsafe. There is a danger to you and your relatives. With this learning, you can take essential preventive measures to keep you and your friends and family safe when utilizing your garage entryway. In this article, we will take a look at the circumstances of how this can occur.
Hitting the Door with a Car
The most common instance of a door falling off its tracks are property holders hitting their garage door with their car. You may be late for work or in a rush to be home, you exit or enter your garage excessively quick without the entryway being totally open… and crash! Also, you could simply back into the door, neglecting to open it with the remote. A poor way to begin the day!
When hit by a vehicle, a garage door usually suffers damage to not only to the bottom two panels but also the whole door system. Also, the vehicle doesn’t have to be moving fast – 5 to 8 km/h is enough to do real damage. Most often a couple of rollers come off their tracks, leaving the garage door hanging precariously from its lift cables.
If this happens, the first thing you should do is turn off your car and get out of the garage in a safe manner. Next, call a local garage door specialist to come and put everything back in proper working order.
Further, you may want to call your Home insurance company and make a claim.
Bent or Misaligned Tracks
The second most common cause is linked to low-quality horizontal tracks installed in your door system. A double garage door can range from 100 to 185 kg – so horizontal tracks are not made from steel strong enough to support the door, a sudden slight impact to the door can cause the tracks to bend and the door to fall off. Ideally, tracks should be made from 14-gauge steel (1.8 mm thick) and reinforced with L-shaped angle iron (13 gauge) to prevent the tracks from bending.
The other problem comes when the tracks aren’t parallel and properly aligned with the vertical rails. This can happen when the bolts on the bracket holding the horizontal tracks become loose. When loose, they cause the bracket to wobble at the slightest vibrations from opening and closing the door. Eventually, the tracks will end up no longer being parallel so that the rollers risk coming off the tracks.
A Broken Roller
If one or two of your garage door rollers break prematurely from extreme wear, or they are of lower quality, this could cause additional stress to be put on the other rollers in the hardware system. This stress could cause other rollers to break, or come off the tracks. Don’t forget that the heavier your garage door is, the more serious the consequences.
There are different size rollers, short or long, based on the length of the steel stem attached to the roller. Short-stem rollers are meant for single garage doors while long-stem rollers are suggested for double doors, 4.9 m wide. Furthermore, with double doors, it is worth installing double hinges at the ends of the door. The combination of “long-stem rollers with double hinges” ensures you’ll have peace of mind and a garage door that operates well.
A Broken Cable
This is a fairly rare occurrence but it could happen, especially if your garage door is older and you have never had it tuned up. The lift cables are located on each side of the door. Each cable winds around grooves in a drum, with the drum attached to a steel shaft holding a torsion spring. If, for any reason, the alignment of the door is disturbed, the cable won’t line up correctly in the drum, then unravel and break without much warning.
When a lift cable breaks, all the weight of the door will transfer to one side. However, only one side cannot hold the full weight of the door. What normally happens in this case is one side closes completely while the other side remains up in the air. With the door in such an unbalanced state, it’s easy to see why the rollers would come off the track system.
Getting an Expert in
Garage doors are very heavy and complex machines, which should not be handled by the inexperienced. With such a demanding safety issue from a faulty garage door, it is vital to call someone like the Perth Garage Door Company for your garage door repair and servicing requirements.