Not necessarily. The past couple(r) days I have worked on and removed some LiftMaster Screw Drive garage door operators.

If you have a garage door opener hanging above your garage door, the motor is spinning something. The something can be a gear connected to a shaft with a chain sprocket or a belt sprocket (chain drive or belt drive).

However, some will have a screw drive. With these, hidden inside the rail (the long straight piece of metal going from the hanging operator to the front wall above the opening) there is a long skinny "screw".

The motor is spinning this screw and the trolley is moving forward and back along this straight path. The j-arm is the metal piece that connects the trolley to the garage door.

Genie is a very popular manufacturer of garage door openers and accessories. Without getting too specific, I do not get the opportunity to work on Genie screw drive operators (or the chain and belt drives).

If you see Chamberlain, LiftMaster, AccessMaster, or Craftsmen, then you may have a type of screw drive operator that I do have some experience working on.

There is a tiny plastic coupler piece that allows the motor spinning the screw drive sprocket to spin the long screw hidden inside the rail. Sometimes this little plastic piece breaks. It's made of plastic. It will break eventually.

If the plastic coupler is cracked and beginning to fail, the garage door will start to sound clunky and may jerk/skip during travel.

If the coupler breaks, when you push the wall station button or the button on your remote/transmitter you will hear the motor running, but the door will not be traveling up or down.

Not to worry. Buy a replacement coupler part. Here's one on Amazon for about 15,000 sats - $10 at the time of posting this: https://a.co/d/a9shDv0

It is beyond the scope of this post to describe how to replace this part, but I will try to make a video of how to do it soon.

Hope you learned something. Don't get screwed.