Garage Door Repair for Latham's 1970s Housing Stock

Parts We Carry

Latham's housing mostly dates to the mid-1970s, with a median build year around 1976. That's past the era of original one-piece wood doors and into the first wave of sectional steel doors with extension springs mounted along the horizontal track rather than torsion springs over the header. We stock extension spring sets, the safety cables that should run through them, and the stamped-steel hinges and rollers that era of door used. We also carry torsion conversion hardware, since a fair number of these doors got upgraded or replaced in the decades since and now run on torsion springs instead. Openers from that period are long gone, so what we're usually swapping is a chain-drive unit installed sometime in the last 20 years, not the original. Cold-climate weatherstripping and bottom seals move fast on this list too - the region sits in a severe cold band, and bottom seals on doors this old are often the original gasket, cracked and letting draft through. What we don't carry on the truck: obsolete wood panel sections. If a 1970s wood door has rotted out a panel, replacement is usually cheaper than sourcing a matching piece.

Getting It Booked In

We run out of Albany, about 6 miles from Latham, so we're not sitting on standby in town - we schedule the call and come over. When you call, tell us the door's age if you know it (most of Latham's housing points to the 1970s unless you're in a newer pocket), whether it's a single or double, and what it's doing: won't open, won't close, makes a bang, drifts down on its own. That last one is almost always a spring losing tension, and on a door this age it's worth knowing whether it's extension or torsion before we load the truck, since the spring stock is different. If you're not sure, a photo of the spring setup over the phone saves a trip back for the right part. We don't do same-day guarantees - we tell you honestly if a part has to be ordered, which happens more with older extension-spring hardware than with newer torsion setups.

Doing It Yourself

There's real daylight between what you should touch and what you shouldn't. Lubricating rollers and hinges, tightening loose bolts on the track brackets, swapping a worn bottom seal before winter - fine, and worth doing given how hard the cold hits this area. Replacing a broken spring is not something to do yourself, full stop, whether it's the extension type common on 1970s-era doors here or a torsion spring on a converted unit. Extension springs under tension have put people in the hospital, and torsion springs are worse. If the door is binding on the track and you can see the track itself is bent or pulled away from the frame, that's also a call-us job, not a crowbar-and-hope job. One thing worth doing yourself: check the auto-reverse safety feature by setting a 2x4 flat on the floor under the door and closing it. If the door doesn't bounce back on contact, stop using the opener and call someone - us or otherwise - before you use that door again.

How We Fix It

On a typical Latham job we're looking at a door installed around or after that mid-70s building wave, so extension springs are common, but we also see torsion retrofits where a homeowner upgraded the door somewhere along the way. We diagnose which setup it is before quoting, because the spring, the cable routing, and the drum hardware are different jobs. For the cold-climate side of things, we check bottom seal and weatherstripping condition on every call even if that's not what you phoned about - a gap there in a severe cold climate turns into a bigger utility bill and sometimes a frozen track. If the door itself has given out structurally rather than a single part failing, we'll tell you plainly when replacement beats repair; patching a 1970s steel door that's rusted through at the bottom panel is throwing money at something that'll fail again in a season.

Frequently asked questions