Seasonal Lubrication and Tightening

Three Visits, Placed Where the Year Puts the Load

Most maintenance plans are sold on a flat interval because an interval is easy to bill. On this coast the year is not flat. It has a wet season for the hardware and a hot season for the fasteners, and they are not the same months.

So the calendar we work to has three fixed points.

Late Spring: Lubrication and Inspection

April or May, before the marine layer settles in for the summer. This is the visit that does the most good, because it puts a fresh film of lubricant on every bearing surface immediately before the months when those surfaces are wet every night.

White lithium grease goes on the hinge barrels, the roller stems, the end bearing plates and the centre bearing. Silicone spray goes on the torsion spring coils, worked along the length so it reaches between the turns rather than sitting on the top face. Nylon rollers get their stems lubricated and their wheels left alone, because oil on the wheel just collects grit.

Then the excess gets wiped off. Excess lubricant is not extra protection, it is somewhere for blown sand to stick.

Autumn: Hardware Tightening

September or October, after a summer of the door heating through the afternoon and cooling overnight, every day, for months. Steel expands and contracts through that cycle and it works fasteners loose. Not dramatically. Just enough that by the end of the season a fair number of them are no longer doing their job properly.

Hinge screws are the usual offenders, particularly the end hinges that carry the roller. Then roller brackets, track bolts, the opener rail fasteners, the header bracket and the bottom brackets. We check to torque rather than by feel, because a hinge screw in a steel skin will strip if you treat it like a lag bolt.

Loose hinges are also the reason a lot of doors here develop a rattle that owners attribute to the opener. The opener is fine. The door is moving in ways it should not.

Winter: Seal and Astragal

Late autumn or early winter, before the first proper storm.

The bottom astragal is the rubber or vinyl strip in the retainer along the bottom of the door. It hardens with age and sun, then splits, and once it splits it stops sealing at exactly the moment you want it working. We pull it and look at the retainer as well, because a corroded retainer will not hold a new astragal properly.

The perimeter stop moulding seal along the jambs and header gets checked for the same hardening, and the threshold, if there is one, for lifting at the edges. Driven rain here comes in at an angle and finds gaps that vertical rain never would.

This is also when we look at whether water is standing against the door on the apron. A door that sits in a shallow puddle for two days after every storm has a bottom section on a shorter clock than the rest of it.

What Not to Do Between Visits

Do not grease the tracks. The track is a guide for the roller, not a bearing surface. Grease in a track collects blown sand and turns into a paste that wears roller stems and leaves black streaks down the inside of the door.

Do not use a water displacing spray as a lubricant. It is a solvent. It will quiet a squeak for an afternoon by dissolving what remains of the old grease, and then the part is drier than it was. If you need to free a seized fastener, use it for that and then lubricate properly.

Do not oil the photo eye brackets or the opener chain sprocket housing on a sealed unit. Neither wants it.

Twice a year with a can of silicone and a tube of white lithium, at the two seasonal points above, covers the vast majority of what a homeowner can usefully do. Call (714) 772-6023 for the parts that need somebody on a ladder with a torque wrench.