I was approached via a housing maintenance company to take a look at some windows that might need some repair at one of Dunedin’s many wonderful aged buildings that was being freshened up, and I am glad I did. 

It turned out that it was years of paint build up had caused the window gaps to be reduced such that closing these fantastically built steel windows was more than the stays could handle, so I got the contract to reproduce what was broken.

I approached the local foundry Giltech and they were incredibly helpful. They cast up a new batch from an original “good” stay that I had removed and disassembled, I then polished them and returned them back to Giltech who put them through a solution taking them back to the tarnished dark brown. From there it was just a matter of reassembly and distressing to have them match more similarly with those that were still existing on site.

That was a great outcome, the steel windows were in solid condition and now with a full compliment of stays they could be good for another century.