I don’t need to explain what is going on here do I? No I didn’t think so.
But for context, I’ve been having trouble closing the bedroom window. I imagined it was something in the mechanism was stuffing up. Finally I got sick of it and pulled the winder off. Doing that was more difficult that said. One of the screws came out but one of them was stubbornly stuck and I ended up snapping it off. Fortunately enough of the shaft was accessible for me to get a pair of pliers, actually side cutters, onto it and remove the embedded section.
Looking at the mechanism it was obvious that the base plate had gone rusty as you can see in the picture. I didn’t really investigate further and figured I’d need to get a new one. Well that was going to be $70+ so I put it off. Then Chris asked me to look at the top bathroom window winder because it too was not working.
That one was definitely stuck and I didn’t fancy my chances of removing it. So I decided to look at the chain. The winder was working well enough except for when the end of the chain was being wound it and I realised it was because the chain links had all seized. I wiggled them around to free them up, brushed them down to get rid of the rust and greased up the entire chain. That got the bathroom winder working.
It also got me thinking about my bedroom winder. I took a look at the chain and, yes indeed. the links at the end were badly rusted and seized. The rust in the base plate was bad enough for it to have burst the rivets joining the body of the winder to the base plate. There’s no way of servicing the winder without forcefully tearing it apart so I did that and removed the chain.
I put the wire brush in the drill press and brushed away all the surface rust from the base plate and the chain, then got to with pliers and wiggled the links to free them up. Once they were articulating I lubed the whole chain with grease. Meanwhile I had sprayed the base plate with rust treatment something or other. Reassembling the mechanism, it was a simple matter to reinstall it with a new screw and hey presto! I can close my window, which is really good because sometimes a lot of dust comes in there.