Can You Do This Yourself
A broken cable under tension is one of the few garage door problems we'd tell you flat out not to touch. The spring holding that door up stores real force, and a cable failure usually means something on the torsion or extension side let go too - you don't know which until someone opens it up. On the 1986-vintage doors common here, we also see original cable drums that are the wrong diameter for the replacement hardware sold today, which is a mismatch a DIY repair kit from a hardware store won't catch. If the door is already down and the opener won't move it, leave it down. Don't force the opener, don't cut the old cable yourself, and don't prop the door with a board and call it fixed.
The Complications
Mountainaire's housing stock is small - under 500 households - and that matters more than people expect. It means we don't keep oddball cable drum sizes pre-stocked for this specific neighborhood the way we might for a bigger subdivision with uniform doors. A lot of houses here have had the original door swapped at some point over the last few decades, so the cable spec on file for a 1986 build doesn't always match what's actually on the track. We check the drum and cable gauge in person before we promise a same-visit fix. If the part's non-standard, that's a second trip, not a stall tactic - we'd rather tell you that up front than quote a number we can't hit.
The Cost of This Job
We don't post a flat number for cable repair because what's actually on your door - original 1986 hardware versus a replaced panel, standard drum versus non-standard - changes the part cost more than the labor. What we can tell you is that a straightforward single-cable swap on original hardware runs lower than a job where we're also replacing a worn drum or correcting a mismatched spring-to-door weight setup, which we see more often than you'd think on houses this age that have had a door upgrade without a hardware upgrade to match. We quote it once we've seen the door, not off a phone description.
