One of the locks on a 22-year-old Jeld-Wen casement window in our bedroom stopped working properly this summer. The window has a lock on either side that pulls the window sash tight against the frame when closed. The lock handle had always clicked into an open position ready to accept the tab on the sash to pull the window tight, but suddenly the handle wouldn’t stay in the open position. It was more an inconvenience than a huge problem, but seemed it should be fixable.

I unscrewed the handle to remove it from the frame to have a better look at it. Comparing it to the lock that still worked, I found a little plastic piece that had been holding the lock in the open position was now broken in two pieces, so the handle had nothing to grip to stay open.

I found an Instructable explaining the problem and a file to 3D print the tiny little plastic piece. Unable to justify buying a 3D printer just to print a Tic Tac sized piece, (though I tried!), I put the file on a thumb drive, filled in a request form and dropped both off to the Summerside Rotary Library with a $2 deposit. I received a phone call a week later to say the piece had been printed. The file actually prints two of the plastic pins, probably because each window has two locks. When I made the request I only needed one, but another pin broke on another window in that week, so I had all I needed for two repairs all for a toonie!

I’m not sure I’ve seen anything that had been 3D printed up close before this. The original piece was most likely injection moulded, so was smooth, but the 3D printed piece had ridges and wasn’t completely round. I couldn’t get the piece into the little slot in the lock at first, but carefully scraping a bit of a ridge off one side allowed it to slide in. Both locks now work perfectly.

Thanks to Gubutek for this nifty fix and my first satisfying dip into the future of fixing.