Kung Fu Maintenance shows you how to repair vertical blinds that are out of step or not rotating properly by replacing the stem and or stem gear.
All right, so today I will be covering how to replace a blind gear and a blind stem. You can see here this one is broken, broken right here. This other blind’s stem is out of step. I’m gonna try to pop it over, see if that fixes it here. If I can get full rotation, then we’re good there.
Broken Vertical Blind Carrier Stem
That looks good. But this broken stem– I mean, yeah, you could finagle this and hang this on here. But that’s not really right. That’s going to keep falling off, the blind is not really going to sit right.
Broken Vertical Blind Stem Removal
Then what you do is pop this stem out. Now this would also be if your stem wasn’t turning at all, or if it kept popping out of step this would be the repair you would want to make. I’m going to pull off a couple of these just so you can see a little better what I’m doing here. Another thing I want you to notice, these edges are really sharp. This is unfinished metal, I’ve cut myself numerous times on it. And I would rather spare you from that.
Holding Vertical Blind Stem Plus Comb Gear Together To Install
Anyway, we’re going to hold our gear in place here. And then just kind of push up, pop this out there. There we go. Inside there should be our little gear piece. Now if our gear piece is fine, we can just leave it there. It just slides into place. If it needed to be replaced, we can move it out.
When I put the new one in, a lot of times I’ll just hold the gear piece against the stem with one hand. And put the whole thing in there, and pop it in there. I’m gonna see if I can just pop this one in. This time, I’m going to try to match my angle on these two. Pop it in, there we go. It looks like it might be one spot out of place. Having said that, we’ll see how it goes.
Now sometimes it’s a little tricky to get the gear piece in there. And what I’ll do is I’ll use my pliers like this. I’ll hold it with my pliers. See, like that. And then I’ll set the piece up inside there. And then set my stem behind that. Put these back up. So this is just a little out of step, so I’m going to turn it one over. And let’s see how it works. There we go.
Testing Vertical Blinds Rotation