Nobody seems to mention keeping the springs lubed for longevity. What's the groups thinking on that? I keep a spray bottle of lube by the door and shoot it every few months, which is probably overkill, but it's so easy. Then just wipe off the excess and grime maybe yearly.
At least according to the article, the main failure mode is fatiguing, so I’m not sure lube would help with that, unless the corrosion is really bad. Most materials have a finite amount of cycles in them (although I’m a bit skeptical of the authors 7 year estimate…it seems low to me)
Roughly 30k cycles is typical.
You can certainly design a spring to have infinite life. But it requires reducing average deflection, aka more spring with less deflection per turn.
The article claims a 10k cycle limit for common-grade torsion springs (but again, I'm skeptical). You can design a spring to have infinite life. Still, you must constrain yourself to specific materials (steel and titanium being the most common) because most materials don't have an infinite life on an S-N curve.
Might help with corrosion, too. My grandfather had a very old garage door and opener, and one day something gave and it blew apart. It sounded very much like a shotgun had been fired inside the garage.
Fortunately, nobody was in or near the garage when it happened, but I'll remember it every time "garage door spring" comes up in conversation.
We had a corroded one that still functioned but I finally buckled under the RACKET the thing made every time the door opened and closed and got it replaced anyway.
Every single time you opened or closed it, it sounded like a goddamn car crash going on out front. Ugh.
Don't just lube the springs, take the cover off the opener and grease up the nylon gears. The grease eventually dries out and then the gears turn into dust.
