Repairing loose hardware at a casement window: Level 2 repair with wood dowels

Casement windows, aka crank-out windows, often fail where the hardware connects to the sash. The wood takes on water, the wood gets soft, and the screws holding the hardware in place come loose. When this happens, the windows don’t crank open and shut properly. The image below shows an example of this, courtesy of my own house.

There are three levels of repair for this condition (in my opinion):

1. Install larger screws. This is a quick and easy fix, and will probably buy you several years of time.
2. Repair the area with wood dowels. If you’ve already installed larger screws and they’ve come loose again or the wood is too soft, this is a good option. That’s what I’ll demonstrate today.
3. Replace a large section of the wood sash with new wood. If your sash looks like the one pictured below, you have some serious rot that requires major repair. I demonstrated this in a blog post titled Repairing a rotted window sash.

In my case, I have a couple of windows that had loose screws back in 2019. I used larger screws and they did the trick for about five years, but now the screws have come loose again. So I opted for repair Level 2, installing wood dowels. The short version of the repair looks like this: drill out the screw holes, install wood dowels, and put screws into the dowels. I’ll demonstrate the long version for the rest of this blog post. I documented the whole thing in the video below.

The photos below are pretty self-explanatory, so I only added brief descriptions. The video above shows all of the steps.

Step-by-step photos

Start by removing the hardware and brackets.

Cut dowels to size. They should be about 1/2″ shorter than the thickness of the window sash. I opted for a 1/2″ oak dowel.

Drill out the screw holes on your sash. Use a depth stop collar on your drill bit to prevent over-drilling, or mark your drill bit with a piece of tape.

Goop the dowels with wood glue.

Tap the dowels into place until they’re flush with the window sash. I let the glue set overnight, but this probably wasn’t a critical step.

Drill pilot holes. Hold the hardware in place to mark where the holes should go.

Paint over the dowels. Wood dowels leave exposed end grain, which is especially susceptible to water damage. Painting the ends will help to seal the wood.

Re-install the hardware. It goes on the same way it came off.

And with that, you should have a long-lasting repair. My total time investment for this project was about an hour for two windows.