Patio door roller repair

A Bad patio door roller is often the reason when your patio door is hard to open. The other possibility is that the door is rubbing somewhere. A patio door roller may have worn out and stopped turning making the door very hard to open.

How to fix a sliding door if the door is rubbing on top.

If you can see scrape marks where the patio door is rubbing on the top frame, It's very likely that settling of the wooden house frame has distorted the patio door frame.

The first step in fixing this is to remove the wooden trim on the inside of the door above the top of the door. After removing this you should see the header and the top of the patio door. Along the width of the door there should be 3 or more sets of wooden shims held in by screws which go right into the header.

Remove all the screws and pull out the wooden shims. See if the patio door frame top springs back into position. If it does, you most likely have solved your problem. Test the patio door and see if it has become easy to slide again.

If it still rubs and does not slide well, the header has sagged too much and will need to be rebuilt and a new patio door installed, before the problem can be corrected.

A patio door should open smoothly and easily. A patio doors steel ball bearing rollers should allow even a small child to open the door with little difficulty. Same applies for the screen door, it should open easily too. Click the link if you need information about screen door rollers

How to fix a door thats rubbing on the door sill

If the patio door is rubbing on the bottom sill plate you can usually tell because the sill plate is worn shiny from the door constantly scraping it. Typically a die cast patio door roller housing will break and the door will drop down. Or an axle will wear through and the door will drop down.

Sometimes the rubbing can be corrected by finding the roller adjusting screws which raise the roller and tightening them. You will often see a small access hole often near the bottom of the edges of the patio door. There should be an adjustment screw inside. Do not remove it ! Some patio door roller assemblies fall apart when you take the screw out. Then you will have to remove the door and change the roller.

To make it easier to turn the adjusting screw, put a flat blade screwdriver underneath the patio door and take the weight off the roller by lifting and holding the door up by 1/4 inch.

If you cant turn the screws you will need to remove the patio door. For safeties sake get someone to help you. Get a friend on the left side of the door and you on the right side. Lift the whole door vertically as far as it will go and try to pull the bottom out over the patio door track. Sometimes the patio door opening has sagged and its hard to get out. I often use a long 2x4 and a hydraulic jack to raise the top plate before trying to remove the door.

To get at the patio door rollers on an aluminum door, there is usually a screw on each side of the door which holds the door bottom on. Remove these screws and grab the bottom of the door and pull it off the glass. Hopefully it will come off easily, often they do not. Be very careful if you have to lever it off, the glass can easily get broken.

Once the bottom is removed, you will see how the rollers are held in. Usually its with a single screw or with bent tabs of metal or a combination of both. Unbend the tabs and remove the screws and take out the roller.

You can then take the roller to a local glass shop to see if they can sell you a replacement, although it is possible the local hardware store may have what you need. There are hundreds of different kinds of roller assembly but many of them use similar sizes of wheels or bearings. Even though the whole housing may be long since out of production, you can often replace the bearing and a new axle.

New Bearings for Aluminum Patio Doors

The 1-1/4" Diameter Patio Door Roller is by the most common size used in most patio doors. There are dozens of different styles of housing but most of them use the same metal bearing so its often possible to change only the bearing. The die cast types generally cannot have the bearings changed because they do not use replaceable axles.

The 1-1/2" Bearings you see here are generally found on aluminum patio doors from the 1950's and 1960's. Usually the housings for these bearings will be made of steel and will still be useable. Thats great because they are long since obsolete and often no longer manufactured.

The 1-1/4" Bearing shown below the 1-1/2" diameter bearing is quite commonly used in patio doors even today. If you have a housing with a removeable axle, you can probably use this bearing to replace the worn out one.

The bearing can be removed by tapping out the axle with a pin punch. Then you insert a new bearing and secure it by tapping in a spring pin. Spring pins are hollow cylinders that are available in many diameters and lengths. Usually you can find one that matches the old axle exactly.

If the old adjusting screw is rusty, a bit of penetrating oil will loosen it up. You will have a roller assembly thats good for another 20 years.

1-1/2" Rollers are not as commonly used as the 1-1/4" Size but there are doors that use them. I have tried to present a good sample of the types of 1-1/2" rollers in use. If you dont see something that you need, please contact me and I will try to source the roller you are looking for.

Die Cast Rollers for Aluminum Patio Doors

Modern patio doors often have die cast metal roller assemblies. Usually there is an arm which adjusts the height of the roller which breaks making height adjustment impossible. With these you generally replace the whole roller assembly because its not possible to put a new bearing into one of these things.

Even if the the original window manufacturer cant be found, existing roller assemblies can often be substituted. The roller shown here is very commonly used in aluminum patio doors.

A couple of tips: The thread style for the mounting screw varies from one manufacturer to the next. Even if the roller assembly looks the same as the old one, dont expect to be able to use the old screw to attach it. And naturally the new rollers dont come with screws !

If your aluminum patio door has 2 sliding glass panels that you normally have to open to get outside, you need a roller with 2 mounting holes side by side. The mounting hole is offset to the left or right in the door bottoms of these style of patio door.

Tandem Rollers for Wooden Patio Doors

Finally, If you have a wooden patio door, you most likely will have tandem style rollers in it. Wooden doors are usually very heavy, so they need the extra weight capacity of these tandem rollers.

Tandem rollers are usually screwed into the door bottom. You dont have to take the bottom of the door off to remove them, as you do with an aluminum door.

The Height adjusting screws are accessed on the door bottom on the inside of the patio door. The adjusting screw access holes are usually covered with plastic caps. These caps may be painted over with many coats of paint so they are sometimes difficult to see and remove.

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