Patio Slider Hard To Use
Kung Fu Maintenance shows you patio sliding glass door wheels changing video on a patio slider hard to use.
We got some sliding glass door wheels that are really hard to pull. If you listen for the bearing; hear that sound. That’s a sound indicating the bearings are bad on the wheels. What we need to do is lift the whole door up and pull it out from the bottom; sweep it out from the bottom. I’m going to lift the door up, pull it out, and then walk it down from the top.
Here’s the wheels; you can see that they’re pretty greasy. You want to avoid getting that grease on the carpet. Here are my new wheels. These are nylon wheels and they work really well, much better, actually, than these metal wheels. You would think the metal wheels would do better, but it just seems that these nylon wheels are so much easier. These aren’t the worst I’ve seen, but we’re going to replace them. Here we go.
On this side it’s really straightforward. First, you want to go ahead on this one, tighten. I like to tighten mine to about here; that seems to work really well for me. This set screw raises or lowers the door and allows you to pivot the door also. I just get mine preset depending on the door. If the door had given me a harder time to come out, I might actually lower the wheel first to make it easier to get the door back in, but this one was pretty straightforward. You want to get them pretty much equal. They’re already there.
On this side it’s pretty straightforward. You can see that the key anchor’s in here. I just pop these out with a screwdriver, like so. You just got to get them to meet there, give the screwdriver a little push, pop it right out. Again, try to avoid getting this stuff on the carpet. I’m going to take it and put it in the bag. On the other side what we have to do is remove this foot pin. It’s got a set screw underneath it. We just need to remove this bottom screw so that way it’s out of the way. The key on this side, it gets bent up inside; that’s the way this one gets anchored into place. You really want to have these anchored so they’re not moving around. Again, we’re going to take the screwdriver and just give it a little push to pop the wheel out. I’m going to grab this with my pliers, pull it out, and put it in a bag so I don’t get it all over anything. There we go. You can see how the key portion is bent up inside there. Let me show you that. Put this in a bag.
Here’s our new one. What you do is insert it up into the key just past the set screw, and then bend it into place. I usually just give this a little tap with my screwdriver to get it to anchor. We want the foot up above the trim. Take your foot bolt, put that back in there; it just slides up. We’re going to set our set screw in place. This should anchor just under the wheel. That’ll lock the wheel into place. If we need to adjust the wheel, we’ll have to remove that pin once it’s in place. I don’t want to tighten it down too tight, I want to tighten it down enough that I’ll be able to slip it off and up if I need to. We’re going to insert the other wheel, like so. It’s got its little key that it gets keyed into, get pushed into. Push it into place. Pretty straightforward. We’re ready to put our door back up.
What you do is set it at an angle close to your door so that you’ll clear your blinds and such. Up top, what we need to do is lift it up into the track and swing the bottom wheels in. We’re going to lift it up on both sides, and then we’re going to swing the bottom wheels in and drop it into the track. Up top, what we want to make sure is that no part of the door is coming out, that everything is staying inside there, along the whole run of closing the door. The next thing you want to check is that we have no gaps along the door when it’s closed. Then go ahead and check if our latch works properly, which it does. We’re going to check for smoothness of operation. Little bit rough up top; it could just use some lube up here.
Here’s our door latch. Everything latches good. We’re all set. Good to go, new patio wheels.