Getting It Booked In
Moulton sits about 18 miles from our shop in Decatur, so when you call about a snapped or frayed cable, we schedule the drive as part of the job, not as an add-on. Tell us what the door is doing - one side hanging low, a loud bang when it let go, a cable wound off the drum - and we bring the right stock for a house built in the era this area was mostly built in rather than guessing on site. Across the wider service area the median home dates to 1988, but Moulton's housing runs older on average, closer to 1978. That gap matters more than it sounds like it should, because it usually means we're not just replacing a cable, we're matching it to a drum and drawbar setup that's a decade or more past what newer Decatur-area doors use. We'd rather know that before we're standing in your driveway than after.
Stocked Parts
We carry standard lift cable in the gauges that fit doors from the late 1970s through the newer builds common elsewhere in the service area, plus the drums and bottom brackets that pair with them. What we don't keep on the truck is anything obsolete enough to need a special order - some of the oldest drawbar and cable-drum combinations from houses built right around 1978 fall into that category, and if your door's original hardware is one of them, we'll tell you on the first visit rather than after we've already pulled the old cable. That's the one honest limit here: a door that old sometimes needs a part we have to order in, and we'd rather say so up front than stretch a same-visit fix that isn't really a fix.
How We Fix It
We release the spring tension first - always, no shortcuts - then pull the damaged cable off the drum and bottom bracket and check the other side while we're in there, since a cable that's frayed on one side of an older door usually has a twin that's not far behind it. New cable goes on, we seat it properly in the drum groove, and we re-tension the door so both sides lift even. If the drum itself is worn from years of cable riding in the same groove, which turns up more often on houses in the Moulton build era than on newer stock, we replace the drum with the cable rather than put fresh cable on a groove that'll chew through it again in a year. We test the door through a full open-close cycle before we leave, listening for the drag or clunk that means something else got missed.
