Garage Door Sizes

How to · 15 minutes

How to lubricate a garage door

Twice a year, with a garage door lubricant or white lithium grease — never WD-40, which is a solvent and strips what is there. Five places take it: the hinges, the roller stems, the springs, the bearing plates and the top of the rail. The track itself gets wiped clean and nothing else.

What you need

  • Garage door lubricant or white lithium spray
  • A rag
  • A stepladder

6 steps

Doing it

  1. Close the door and unplug the opener.
  2. Wipe the inside of both tracks with a dry rag.The track is a path, not a bearing. Grease there collects grit and grinds the rollers.
  3. Spray each hinge where the two halves pivot.That pin is where most of the squeak comes from.
  4. Spray the roller stems, and the bearings on steel rollers.Nylon rollers with sealed bearings need the stem only — spraying the wheel just makes it slip.
  5. Spray the springs along their length, and the bearing plates each end of the bar.A dry spring rusts from the inside of the coil and fails years early. In coastal Florida this is the single best thing you can do for it.
  6. Spray the top of the opener rail and wipe the excess. Plug it back in and run it twice.
Two grey raised-panel garage doors side by side seen from inside a garage, each with steel struts across the panels, its own torsion spring on a shaft above the opening, curved track running back to the ceiling and a wall control beside it.
Two doors, two spring assemblies, one pier between them. A single wide door would need none of that and a header instead. — MF Garage Doors, Sebring, Florida.

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More how-to

How to program a garage door openerHow to open a garage door manuallyHow to reset a garage door openerHow to align garage door sensorsHow to insulate a garage doorHow to paint a garage doorHow to replace garage door rollersHow to program a garage door keypad

Also asked

When it does not go to plan

Why not WD-40?

Because it is a solvent, not a lubricant. It cleans and displaces water, which means it strips out the grease that is already in a bearing and leaves it drier than it found it. Use a garage door lubricant — a lithium or silicone spray made for the job.

Does the track get lubricated?

No, and this is the mistake that makes a door worse. The rollers are meant to roll along the track, not slide. Grease in the track collects grit and turns into a paste that wears the rollers. Lubricate the rollers' bearings, the hinges, the springs and the bearing plates — and wipe the track clean instead.

How often?

Twice a year is plenty on a normal house, and it is the single cheapest thing that extends the life of everything else. A door that has gone quiet after lubrication was telling you something before you did it.

Written by MF Garage Doors, who have been fitting and repairing garage doors out of Sebring, Florida since 2019. The photographs are of their own work.

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