Prototype Window Refurbishment

"I'll give myself a break from all the difficult head-scratching stuff and just re-do one of the windows."

Job number one: remove the pitting and corrosion from the frames, arms, and window aperture.

Well, the frames and arms were easy. I dropped them off at my local sandblaster and they came back looking new. The window aperture, on the other hand, flummoxed me.

A wire wheel didn't work. Sanding didn't work. And I couldn't for the life of me figure out how to get into the corners of the odd shaped extrusions that formed the window aperture, and I didn't want to remove the whole window frame to take it to the sand blaster. Eventually, I realized, the sand blaster had to come to the window.

I discovered a small media blasting machine designed for archeologists to clean up bones, ordered one, and gave it a go. It almost worked, but after a call to technical support I discovered I needed a different type of blasting media. I also discovered that media blasting makes a fucking massive mess, so I would need a powerful extractor. That was the next purchase — a Bosch unit with a Mullet external cyclone.

Well, after weeks of getting nowhere fast, finally it was easy.

I blasted the aperture clean, sprayed the relevant parts white so they looked fresh, polished up the window frames, replaced the ancient heavy glass with lightweight (and more thermally efficient) polycarbonate, replaced the gaskets and the winding mechanism (along with a 3d printed replacement for the plastic plug that window rail sits in) and the job was done.

Night and day. Better than new.