Garage Door Springs for Dummy Homeowners

Move the "cable," Laura???

If you were to ask each of our researchers what trait of self-appointed freelancers drives them craziest, the answer would be pretty much the same across the board. That answer is, "Thinking that having a degree renders them smarter than the average DIY handyman." No kidding: we see this one all the time, especially among eHow.com's stable of J-school, English, and liberal arts graduates. Take, for instance, Laura Hageman, who attempted help some poor bastard figure out "How to Adjust Garage Door Tension"¹ at HomeSteady.com.

Hageman, typical of eHowians everywhere, glossed over the fact that garage doors don't have tension, they have springs with tension. What's more important, she also glossed over the two different types of garage door springs, neglecting to mention that adjusting a torsion spring on a garage door is a task better left to a pro... ooops.

Laura starts out with the utterly banal,

"Most homes have garages and each garage has a door. If the springs are not tight or the tension is too loose, the door will not easily open and close."

Right away, we know that she thought that there's only one kind of door, the type with extension springs on either side. Luckily, that's the kind that competent DIYers (which definitely leaves Hageman out) can repair on their own. What follows, however, is Laura's half-baked rewording of some instructions she found somewhere (her references were never published, not even in the 2009 original). Even those, she hosed, providing succinct instructions like

"Open the garage door. Use vice grip to hold the door open by placing the grip where the door slides. Place a grip on each side of the garage door."

Ouch, that hurts our collective head with its crap like "vice grip" and "where the door slides"! Apparently she was afraid she'd get nailed for plagiarism if she used "track" instead of that last... Then, there's the "detailed" instructions Hageman provided for adjusting the tension or the "door":

• "Adjust the cable. There is a cable on each side of the door that will come loose when the door is up. This cable allows you to adjust the tension of the garage door. Take the cable out of the bracket hole that sits in on each side of the garage door and put it into a hole closer to the opening of the door. This will increase the tension of the garage door."
• "Check the cables to see if they are still too loose. If they still have too much flexibility, take the cable out of the hole and pull the cable through its fitting. Pull more of the cable through its fitting to tighten the tension."

Yeah, you're supposed to do all this with, according to Hageman, "pliers" and "2 vice grips." No mention of how to decide whether you do this on both sides or one side, no mention of the routing of the cable (through the spring, if you wondered), and most of all, no mention that you don't move the cable around, you move the spring around – the cable's only function is safety, making certain that if an extension spring breaks it won't brain someone standing nearby.

So what do we have? We have a freelancer with a "Bachelor's Degree in Arts" whose half-witted DIY instructions lack a diagnosis step, don't mention the dangers of messing with torsion springs, confuse cables with springs, and don't even include instructions for "adjusting" the "cables." Definitely worthy of the award of Dumbass of the Day, dangerous stupidity division.

¹ The original has been deleted by Leaf Group, but can still be accessed using the Wayback machine at archive.org. Its URL was   ehow.com/how_5035517_adjust-garage-door-tension.html

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