Please help me put the proper name to a thingamajigger (window hardware)

Factual Questions
1

Hi! Once again it has become incumbent upon me to try and repair something for somebody in order to comply with regulations requiring that it works. Just take my word for it, please – can’t replace them with new ones, can’t get a professional to do it for immutable reasons.

Okay, this time, it’s aluminum-frame single-hung windows. The lower window, which slides, has along its bottom frame two sliding button/tabs. When you slide these tabs in towards the center, it releases the window to slide freely up and down.

When you release the tabs, although I can’t actually see what’s going on inside there, I assume that what happens is that a little tooth is released on each side, which will then lodge in the nearest notch in a series of parallel notches in the outer (vertical) frames on the left and right. The window is then held open at that latitude until you push the tabs in again to slide the window again.

Okay, hopefully I’ve described it well enough that somebody will know what I’m talking about.

Now, the windows, (four of them) will no longer stay open unpropped. The tabs are still in place, and you can still push the tabs, but nothing engages to hold the window open.

I have it on fairly good authority that the problem concerns a spring somewhere inside the assembly that will need to be replaced in each window.

Assuming that I can even find a retailer who will sell me such an item – what exactly is the part called, and how specifically should I ask for it?

If anyone could point me to a diagram of how the hell I would get the frame open to install the new spring, it would be enormously helpful. The thing appears in a cursory examination to be impervious. (i.e., no obvious screws or plugs or fasteners.)

Thanks!

2

If it is the spring, you should be able to hold the tabs out & the window won’t move.

If it still slides, then it is the gripper end part or the frame itself.

They are a PITA to get apart & 10X a PITA to do so where they will ever fit again much less be repaired. Need pictures to be sure. Some are screwed together & are easier.

IMO, cutting the windows out flush with the walls as best you can & then install a new, smaller window, cheap from a place that has removed house stuff, windows, doors, toilets, etc…

Can be made to look really good…

YMMV

3

Never have seen the exact type you’re describing - with a spring - but usually it’s the tab that’s broken. Obviously not true from your description.

Basically you’re fucked. Aluminum windows are really, at heart, a disposable item. Have the owner buy new and be a hero by installing them.

4

Alas, I fear the two of you are right. There certainly seems to be no clear way to fix them — like I said, they’re not even held together with screws, a feature that, without which, it seems improbable that they can be reliably disassembled (and more importantly, reassembled) at all.*

*Wow, them windows are so janky, they have messed up my grammar!
Maybe I can somehow invent a novel add-on-type contraption that would be able to engage with the notches, and make the windows technically functional.

Thanks for your help! As always, I am grateful to the contributors here, and the Board in general, for making possible the unparallelled resource that is the SDMB.

5

My old enclosed patio had windows and screens like that, and they were a royal pain. Some of them wouldn’t stay up, and the rest wouldn’t stay down. Nothing fit right, so there were a lot of little gaps to the outside, enabling insects and centipedes to come in uninvited. And like many uninvited guests, they refused to leave, so I had to kill them.

I wound up having the entire patio removed and replaced.

6

take some wood (3/8" trim or doweling) cut to various lengths. use to prop open.

if the track had holes in it ( the recesses the slide end poked into) then a large paper clip with one section bent out at a right angle; stick the bent out end in the hole downward, the rest of the paperclip is to grab on and hold up the window.