Can a strut straighten my bent garage door panel?

Strut: A solid one piece of molded sheet metal cut to the same length as the width of your garage door. This reinforcement at the top of your door is there to keep the opener arm that attaches to the top panel of the door from bending top panel when opener pulls on panel to open door. Any garage door with an opener that has an arm and pulls door open from the top panel has to have some kind of strut to protect top panel from damage, no matter how wide the door. When you have a garage door that is over 16 ft. wide than you should have a strut on every panel. This is necessary because when a door panel is longer than 16ft. wide it will sag or be concave when the door is in the up position. Struts eliminate this from happening when the door is up. When a garage door is constructed of wood it is even more necessary to have multiple struts even on smaller garage doors 8-10 ft. wide. If you have a custom carriage door made of all wood or metal panels on the inside and wood overlay on the outside it is also necessary to have sometimes 2 struts on each panel. Steel and wood combination doors really sag a lot when in up position because of the extra weight of the wood on outside.

common reason for damage to top panel of a garage door

The most common reason for damage to top panel of a garage door even with the reinforcement of a strut is someone locking door with a mechanical locking system and someone tries to open with opener and forgets or doesn’t know door is locked. This will do damage immediately. Or the same outcome will happen if the door won’t move because something won’t let it like broken springs or object in garage is in the way of the travel of the door. There are many ways for a garage door panel to get bent. you can run into them with a vehicle or the garage door opener will pull on the top section and bend it if the door is locked or if a garage door has some slight crack in it then the door will will tend to bow down words when the door is in the up position. Garage door panels are bent it would make it difficult for the door to close properly but opening may not be a problem but you will always have a problem when you try to close it because the panels do not line up correctly when they come together as the door closes they will sometimes make a popping noise this means that when the two panels meet together they are not lined up and they will pop. All of these cases the only thing that I can do when I come across these problems is to put a strut on the garage door pannel to either make the bend of the panel less of a problem. Adding or replacing a strut on our garage door panel sometimes does not always fix the bend in a panel but will absolutely help make the garage door functional once again by giving it extra rigidity.