Thank you, Jasmine! That was a helpful response. Now I'm wondering, though, whether all I really need is the coil balance spring because that's what snapped. The coil housing pivot seems as if it's just fine. Am I right that once I had the housing pivot out of the window track, there would be a way to attach the new spring?
Speaking of the window track, I still have the following question from my original post: The other thing you'll see from my picture is that there is no slot in the window frame for me to remove the existing broken balance (or install the new one). Does that require me to cut out my own space (as I saw done in one of the youtube videos I watched). If so, do you have a recommendation of where I should make that cut and how?
I also saw that you had those "jamb spreaders" to avoid having to do this kind of cutting, but they were fairly expensive ...
Thanks again for your help!
Again, that was helpful, Jasmine. Thank you! I am very impressed by you. Due to your excellent customer service, it's likely I will turn to SWISCO for all my window hardware needs.
Hello again, Jasmine,
I have learned a lot about how coil balance systems work as a part of this process! The video and feedback you provided were very helpful, as have been the parts I've purchased from Swisco so far. However, I have a couple of follow-up questions: 1) I mistakenly ordered a 10 lbs. coil for one of my windows, when I really needed a 7 pounder. Is it possible to return it for a refund? 2) Speaking of returns, the coil housing pivot you recommended was the right size, but I didn't realize until it arrived that it didn't work with the kind of pivot bar we have on our windows. Our pivot shoes have a depression on them that the collars of our pivot bars fit into (the depression surrounds the actual blue hole that the pokey-out part of the pivot bar slides into -- I hope that makes sense!). Anyway, since the housing pivot didn't seem to work, I wondered if I could return that, too. 3) And that leads me to my final question regarding pivot shoes: My windows are all operational now because I've replaced all the snapped coils we had. But an ongoing problem is that my pivot shoes do not stay in place when they're supposedly in the locked position. That makes it very hard to work with the window sometimes because the coil housing units go snapping up (with a great deal of alarming force, destroying parts in the process). I believe I caused this problem originally because I smeared a lubricant in the window track when the windows were squeaking very loudly, but even after thoroughly cleaning all the affected parts, the shoes are still not locking as they should. Do you have any suggestions for how to address this problem?
Thank you for your help, Jasmine. Here are a couple of pictures of our existing pivot bars. I also included a picture of what our pivot shoe looks like, so you can see what I was describing about how there's a shallow depression around the blue hole that the wide part of the pivot bar fits into. I also uploaded a picture of the bottom of the window that I removed the pivot bar from.
4 user uploaded images
