What the Weather Here Does to It
We're in a mild temperate band, not a freeze-thaw climate, so you won't get the hardware snapping from cold contraction the way a door up north would. What you get instead is humidity and salt-tinged air working steadily on anything that isn't sealed, which on a house from the 60s or 70s often means original steel hinges and rollers that were never swapped for sealed-bearing parts. That shows up as a dry squeal on rollers, a low groan from hinges that have surface rust at the pivot, and a track that's gone slightly tacky with corrosion rather than smooth. Because the weather here doesn't put the kind of mechanical stress on springs that freezing temperatures do, when you hear a spring-related noise in this area it's almost always age and cycle count catching up with hardware that's been turning for decades, not a weather event. That's a useful thing to know when you're trying to tell a routine squeak from something about to fail.
The Situation
Across the area we work - 76,302 owner-occupied houses out of roughly 300,000 households - a huge share of garages are still running hardware that matches the house's original build era, somewhere in the 1962 to 2005 range with a lot clustering around the mid-70s. That means a noise that sounds minor is frequently a part that's 30 to 50 years into service rather than 5. Rollers and hinges from that era were often plain steel, not nylon or sealed bearing, so a scraping or grinding sound isn't a lubrication problem you can fix with a spray can - it's metal wearing on metal because the part has outlived its design life. A rhythmic thump once per rotation usually means a flat spot on a roller. A metallic ping during travel, especially on an older double door, often means a cable strand starting to fray at the drum. None of that is urgent until it is, and then it's urgent fast.
