How It Shows Up
A cable failure on a 1997-era door rarely happens all at once. First it's a door that racks slightly to one side as it closes, because one cable has stretched or frayed while the other hasn't. Then you get a door that drops the last foot instead of closing smooth, or one that won't budge past the halfway point because the cable has jumped the drum groove. If you catch it at the fraying stage - visible broken strands near the bottom bracket - that's a controlled repair. If you catch it after it's already snapped, the door is now held by one cable and the opposite side of the panel can bind in the track or bow outward. Either way, do not run the opener to force it through. That's how a bent track or a cracked bottom panel gets added to what was a simple cable job.
Doing It Yourself
Garage door cables run under real spring tension, and that tension is what makes this a bad DIY repair regardless of your general handiness. The cable itself is cheap. The problem is that you can't safely access the drum and the bottom bracket without first dealing with the torsion spring that's holding the whole system under load, and that's the same spring that causes serious injuries every year when people wind or unwind it without the right bars. If the door is still partially operable, the safe DIY move is to leave it alone and not force the opener - unplug it so nobody tries to use it by remote, and call. There's no safe halfway step between
How We Fix It
We release tension from the torsion spring safely, pull both cables regardless of which one failed, and check the drums for the groove wear and pitting that's common on doors from the late 1990s. If one cable snapped from fatigue, the other is usually close behind, so we replace the pair rather than the one that happened to go first - replacing a single cable and leaving its twin at the same age is a callback waiting to happen. We re-tension the spring to match the door's actual weight, run it through a full cycle by hand before testing the opener, and check that the bottom brackets didn't take any damage while the door was running lopsided.
The Complications
Not every cable job is a cable job. If the door hit the frame hard after one cable let go, the track can bend enough that cable alone won't fix it - that's a track repair riding along with the cable work, and it adds to the bill. We also won't quote a cable repair over the phone as a flat price sight unseen, because drum condition and bracket damage vary enough from door to door that guessing would mean either underquoting or padding the number to cover ourselves. One honest limit: if the opener, springs, and tracks are all original to a 1997 install and the cable failure is the third hardware issue in two years, we'll tell you straight that a full door replacement is probably cheaper over the next five years than another round of individual repairs.
