What Can Go Wrong
The most common call we get from East Moline is a torsion spring that's let go on a door installed when the house was built
The median home here went up around 1967, which puts a lot of garages on original or first-replacement hardware - steel that's had fifty-plus years to fatigue. Springs wound for a lighter door, back when panels were thinner steel instead of insulated, tend to snap without warning, usually on the coldest morning of the year or the hottest week of summer.
Past the spring, we see worn rollers that have gone from steel to nylon over the decades as owners patch things piecemeal
And center bearings that were never swapped out when the spring was replaced the first or second time. Openers are a mixed bag - a chain-drive unit from the 80s next to a newer belt-drive unit put in after a storm took out the old one. None of this is unusual for a town with housing from this period; it's just a different failure pattern than you'd see on newer construction.
