Balances, hinges, operators, locks, rollers and weatherstripping — supplied for current systems and for windows no longer manufactured.
Hardware is the part of a window that wears out. The glass will still be glass in thirty years; the hinge, the balance, the operator and the lock are doing mechanical work every time the window moves, and they are what brings us back to a building.
This page covers what we supply and how to identify what you have. If you can send a photograph and the screw hole spacing, we can usually name the part.
A balance counterweights the sash so it stays where you put it. When it fails, the sash drops, the meeting rails fall out of line, and the sash lock will no longer engage — which is why a window that will not lock is often a balance problem rather than a lock problem.
Cord and weight. The original system: a sash cord over a pulley to a cast iron weight in a pocket inside the frame. Simple, repairable and long-lived. Almost always what you find in buildings put up before around 1950.
Spiral balance. A twisted rod inside a tube, tensioned against a spring. Compact, adjustable and common on mid-century and later wood and aluminium windows.
Block and tackle. A pulley and cord system inside a channel, used in vinyl and aluminium replacement windows. Carries heavier sashes than a spiral of the same size.
Constant force. A coiled stainless spring that applies even lift through the whole travel. The current standard on quality replacement windows, and the smoothest in use.
Casement friction hinges carry the sash out and along as it opens, so the weight is supported at the top and bottom rather than hanging on a butt hinge. Friction in the track holds the sash at any position against wind. Egress hinges are a variant that swings the sash further clear of the frame so the opening meets escape requirements.
Wash hinges shift the sash sideways as it opens, leaving a gap between sash and frame so the outer face can be cleaned from inside — worth specifying above the second floor.
Tilt-and-turn hardware is a different order of complexity: a scissor stay at the head, corner drives, and a multi-point locking bar running around the perimeter, all operated from one handle. The scissor arm is what restrains the sash in the tilt position and what carries it when the sash swings in.
Pivot hinges carry the sash on a central axis and are used where a panel is too large or too heavy for conventional hinges.
Crank operators drive casement and awning sashes through a gear and arm. Dual-arm operators handle wider sashes. The common failure is a stripped gear, usually from forcing a window that was painted shut.
Electric and chain operators are used where a window cannot be reached — high level, over a stairwell, above a fixed obstruction — and on smoke ventilation systems where windows must open automatically.
Cam or sweep locks on double-hung windows draw the meeting rails together under compression. Multi-point locking on tilt-and-turn and casement units engages at several points around the perimeter, which is a sealing item as much as a security one. Keyed locks exist but are a genuine hazard on an escape window if the key is absent, and we will say so before fitting them.
Sliding windows and doors run on tandem rollers in a sill track. Nylon tyres on steel or brass housings outlast plain plastic wheels by a wide margin for very little extra cost. A slider that has become stiff is usually telling you the track needs cleaning rather than the window needs replacing — grit under a roller acts as an abrasive.
The seal between sash and frame, and the most neglected item on this page. Compression gaskets on hinged windows, pile and fin seals on sliding types. Perished weatherstripping is frequently the whole explanation for a draught that people blame on the glass, and it is among the cheapest repairs available.
Hardware follows building age more reliably than it follows neighbourhood, and knowing the era tells you most of what you need before anyone opens a window.
The brownstone and rowhouse districts of Brooklyn and the pre-war apartment stock of the Bronx and upper Manhattan are overwhelmingly double-hung, and the original hardware is cord and weight. Where windows were replaced in the 1960s through 1980s, you generally find spiral balances instead.
This is the largest share of our balance work: Park Slope, Carroll Gardens, Bed-Stuy, Crown Heights, Flatbush, and the Grand Concourse and Fordham corridors in the Bronx. The recurring finding is a whole building of windows that will not stay up and will not lock, where the diagnosis is balances rather than sashes.
On a building-wide programme, the survey has to identify patterns, not just count openings. Older buildings rarely have one window type throughout, because earlier replacement campaigns leave a mix, and a single balance or lock pattern will not fit all of them.
European tilt-and-turn systems arrived in New York residential work in earnest from the 1990s, and they are now standard in newer Manhattan apartment buildings and in high-specification conversions.
The hardware is entirely different from anything in a pre-war building: a scissor stay at the head, corner drives transmitting movement around the frame, and a multi-point locking bar, all driven from a single handle. It works well and it is precise, which is the same reason it needs adjusting rather than forcing when something binds.
Two practical notes. Tilt-and-turn hardware is system-specific — parts are not interchangeable between manufacturers, so identification matters before ordering. And a sagging tilt-and-turn sash is usually an adjustment at the corner bearing rather than a failed component.
The 1960s and 70s housing of Mid-Island Staten Island, Bayside, Fresh Meadows, Canarsie and Mill Basin is largely horizontal sliders in wide openings. Hardware work here is rollers, tracks and latches, and the most common call is a slider that has become hard to move. Clean the track first.
Salt is the governing factor. Plated finishes corrode, fasteners seize, and stainless is the sensible specification for anything exposed. This applies to the fixings as much as the visible hardware.
Hotels and large buildings need every unit identical, because staff have to operate them without thinking and a mixed inventory of hardware is a maintenance problem for years. Specification also has to account for heavier, less careful use than domestic service.
The name is misleading. A double-hung sash lock is a security device, but that is the smaller half of its job. Its more important function is mechanical: as the cam rotates it draws the upper and lower sash together at the meeting rail and holds them under compression against the weatherstripping.
That is why a failed or missing sash lock shows up as a draught before it shows up as a security problem. Unlocked, or locked with a worn cam that no longer pulls, a double-hung window relies on friction alone at the meeting rail and the seal there does very little. People replace whole windows over a draught that a twelve-dollar lock and thirty minutes would have fixed.
Cam or sweep lock. The standard. A rotating cam on the lower sash meeting rail engages a keeper on the upper sash and pulls the two together. Almost all residential double-hung windows use this.
Keyed sash lock. Same mechanism with a key cylinder. Common on ground floor and fire-escape-adjacent openings, and the subject of a real code caution set out below.
Ventilating latch or night lock. A secondary catch that lets the sash open a few inches and no further, so a window can be left open overnight without being openable from outside.
Sash stops and opening limiters. Restrict travel rather than lock the window shut. These sit at the boundary between hardware and code compliance.
Sash locks look interchangeable and are not. Four dimensions decide whether one will fit: the screw hole spacing, the height of the meeting rail, the projection of the cam, and the position of the keeper on the opposing rail. Get the screw spacing wrong and you are drilling new holes into a rail that may already be weak from the last set.
Handing matters on some patterns and not others. Many cam locks are ambidextrous; keyed and specialist patterns often are not.
Material affects service life more than appearance suggests. Die-cast zinc is the common budget option and is what usually fails, typically at the cam boss. Solid brass and stainless last considerably longer and are worth specifying on a building where sending someone back is expensive. In coastal locations, stainless rather than plated finishes is the sensible choice.
A worn cam that turns but no longer draws the sashes tight. Screw holes stripped out of old wood, so the lock rocks under load. Paint, which is endemic in older buildings and jams the mechanism or obscures the keeper. And misalignment — where the sash has dropped because the balances have failed, the meeting rails no longer line up and no lock will engage properly.
That last one matters, because replacing the lock will not fix it. If the meeting rails are out of alignment the problem is the balance system, and we will say so rather than fitting a new lock that will fail the same way.
Two code points come up on almost every multi-unit job, and both are worth knowing before ordering hardware.
Window guards under Local Law 57. New York City Administrative Code §27-2043.1 requires owners of multiple dwellings to provide, install and maintain approved window guards on every window of any unit where a child ten years of age or under resides, and on windows in the public areas of such a building. Owners must also install them on written request from any tenant, whether or not a child lives there, and must send tenants an annual notice between 1 and 16 January.
Approved guards have bars spaced no more than 4.5 inches apart, must withstand 150 pounds, and carry a Department of Health approval number. The exceptions are windows giving access to a fire escape and a first-floor window that is a required means of egress. HPD treats missing or improperly installed guards as Class C immediately hazardous violations.
Keyed locks and egress. A keyed sash lock on a bedroom window is a genuine hazard if the key is not present in an emergency, and it can put an opening out of compliance where that window is a required means of escape. We will fit keyed hardware where it is appropriate, and we will raise it where we think the opening should not have it.
We carried out sash lock replacement across a Moxy hotel property in Manhattan, brought in to do the hardware by the contractor holding the job. Hospitality work has requirements that residential jobs do not, and most of them are about how the work is sequenced rather than the hardware itself.
Every unit has to end up identical, because housekeeping and maintenance staff have to operate them without thinking and a mixed inventory of hardware is a maintenance problem for years afterwards. Rooms come out of service one at a time and go back the same day, so the work is scheduled around occupancy rather than the other way round. Finish has to match the room specification, since the hardware is visible to guests. And the specification has to account for guest use, which is heavier and less careful than domestic use — this is where die-cast fails early and solid hardware pays for itself.
A whole-building lock replacement in an apartment building is as much a logistics exercise as a hardware one. Access has to be arranged unit by unit, which means notices, scheduling and a realistic allowance for units nobody is home in.
Two things make or break the survey. First, older buildings rarely have one window type throughout — earlier replacement campaigns leave a mix, and a single lock pattern will not fit all of them. Counting openings is not enough; the patterns have to be identified. Second, if the building falls under the window guard requirement, the guard and the lock interact, and it is better to specify them together than to fit hardware that then has to be worked around.
Ocean Avenue runs from Prospect Park through Flatbush, Midwood and down towards Sheepshead Bay, largely pre-war apartment buildings with original or long-serving double-hung windows.
On stock like this, repair is often the better answer than replacement. A building may need a hundred locks and only forty windows genuinely rebuilt. Working out which is which is the value of the survey, and it usually saves considerably more than the survey costs.
The recurring finding is the one described above: locks that will not engage because the sash has dropped. Fitting new locks to those windows without addressing the balances produces a building full of new hardware that still does not close properly. We would rather report that than take the easier order.
For a single window, a photograph of the existing lock and the screw hole spacing is usually enough. For a building, we survey — identifying the window patterns, counting openings by type, and flagging where the sashes rather than the locks are the problem. We work across Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx and Staten Island, and throughout Northern New Jersey, the Jersey Shore, Philadelphia and the Lehigh Valley.
Most hardware enquiries are solved from a photograph. What we need is a clear picture of the part in place, a second with it removed if it comes out easily, and the screw hole spacing measured centre to centre. For balances, the sash height and weight matter; for hinges, the stack height and the track length.
We supply for current systems and for windows no longer manufactured. Where a pattern is genuinely obsolete we will say so and tell you what the realistic options are — adapting a current part, replacing hardware across an elevation for consistency, or in some cases replacing the unit.
Related pages: window guards and opening limiters for the Health Department requirements, insect screens for mesh and frame options, and double-hung sash locks in detail.
We supply and install across Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx and Staten Island, and throughout Northern New Jersey, the Jersey Shore, Philadelphia and the Lehigh Valley, with collection from our Staten Island shop by appointment.
Get a quote for your project today
