Hollywood, FL · Garage Door Service
Snapped or frayed cable on a Tamarac garage door? We travel from Hollywood to fix steel sectional doors built during the area's 1980s boom, done right the first time.
Most garage doors in Tamarac went up around 1981, later than the 1973 median across the wider service area we cover from Hollywood. That decade is when steel sectional doors took over from the older single-panel wood slabs, so what you've got is almost certainly a two-inch-thick steel sectional, either a 16x7 double or a 9x7 single, hung on two lift cables running from the bottom bracket up to a drum on the torsion shaft. When one of those cables lets go, the door doesn't glide, it drops on one corner and hangs crooked in the track, sometimes with the cable itself curled up loose near the bottom roller. On a steel door of this era the cable is doing real work holding roughly 130 to 180 pounds of panel weight, so a frayed strand near the drum or the bottom fitting is the thing to catch before it snaps completely and drops the door on a foot, a bumper, or a bike leaned against the wall.
A cable rarely fails alone on a door this age. Forty-plus years in, the drums that the cable winds onto often have wear grooves cut into the aluminum from decades of the old cable riding the same path, and setting a new cable on a worn drum just sets up the next failure. The lift springs on doors from the early 1980s were sized for the door weight new; if a spring has weakened over the years, the cable on the opposite side takes more load than it should and wears faster. So the actual job, more often than not, is replacing both cables as a pair, checking the drums for grooving, and confirming the springs are still balanced. Doing one cable and walking away is how you get a callback three months later for the other side.
South Florida's mild, humid climate doesn't freeze cables the way a northern winter does, but it does something slower and just as damaging: it corrodes galvanized cable strands from the inside of the wind, where you can't see it, well before the outer coating looks bad. On a door built in 1981, that's four-plus decades of salt-laden air working on the same hardware, and a cable that looks fine at the drum can be down to a handful of intact strands where it wraps the bottom bracket. Across the households we serve, median income sits near $60,900, and in Tamarac itself it's close to $59,200 with roughly 31,000 households in town, which matters for one reason: full cable-and-drum replacement is a job most owners plan for rather than treat as an emergency splurge, and it's worth doing once, correctly, rather than twice.
We run this job out of Hollywood, about 13 miles from Tamarac, so there's no local branch or drop-in counter here, just a truck that comes to you. When you call, tell us the door size, whether it's one cable or both that look worn, and whether the door is stuck shut, stuck open, or hanging at an angle, since that changes what we load on the truck before we head out. If the door is already off track or leaning hard on one cable, don't try to force the opener to close it. Leave it where it sits and call; forcing a door with a failing cable is the fastest way to bend a track or crack a panel on top of the cable problem.
We don't post flat prices here because the real cost swings on what we find once the door's open: a single cable swap is a different job from cable-plus-drum, and a door with a weak spring on top of a worn cable is a third scope entirely. What we can tell you is that we price it after a look at the actual hardware, not off a phone guess, and we'll say plainly if a repair isn't worth it compared to replacing an aging opener or spring set at the same time. If you want the specifics on how we handle pricing and scheduling for cable jobs generally, that's covered on our main Hollywood page, not repeated here.
Doors built around 1981 use standard steel sectional hardware, so cables and drums are common sizes we stock. The harder cases are homes with original wood doors from before the 1970s steel shift, which are rarer here and sometimes need a custom-cut cable.
You can, but on a door this age we usually recommend replacing both lift cables together. They wear at close to the same rate, and fixing one side only means the other is likely to go next, often within months.
No. We work out of Hollywood and drive to Tamarac jobs, about 13 miles each way. There's no local counter or drop-off here, just a scheduled truck visit.
South Florida's humid air corrodes galvanized cable strands from inside the wind, where the damage doesn't show until the cable is already down to a few good strands. That's common on doors from the early 1980s that have never had the cable replaced.
Call now or request a free quote - same-day service on most repairs, upfront written pricing.
