Panel Replacement for Westwood's 1960s Garage Doors

Time on the Job

Most of the garage doors we pull panels off of in Westwood went in when the house did, and the median house here dates to 1966. That means a steel sectional door, usually a 16x7 double or a 9x7 single, flush or short-raised panel profile, no foam core in the original run. A single-panel swap on a door like that is a shorter job than most people expect once we're on site - the work is in finding a panel that matches a track width and a hinge spacing that nobody has made new in decades, not in the swap itself. If the exact panel isn't out there, we're matching color and rib pattern as close as the aftermarket allows, not pretending it's identical. We work out of Kalamazoo, about three miles from Westwood, so getting a truck to your driveway isn't the bottleneck - sourcing the right panel is.

What Causes It Around Here

This area sits in a severe cold climate band, and steel panels from the 1960s don't flex well once temperatures drop. A door that's taken a dent in summer might crack clean through along that same dent line come a hard freeze, because the metal's gone brittle and the paint and primer from the original run have had sixty years to thin out. We also see panel failure from the basics - a car bumper, a basketball, a trash can caught by wind - but on a Westwood-era door the damage spreads further than it would on a newer insulated panel, because there's no foam backing holding the shape once the steel skin gives. Rust along the bottom panel is common too, especially where a door has sat low to a driveway apron for fifty-some years without a new bottom seal.

The Complications

The complication with a house built around 1966 isn't the labor, it's the part. Panel widths, hinge hole spacing, and even the depth of the raised-panel stamp changed across manufacturers and across decades, so a single replacement panel for a door that age often doesn't exist in the exact profile anymore. We can usually get close on color and rib style from current aftermarket stock, but we tell people up front when a

What It Costs

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Frequently asked questions