Ah the beauty of vinyl windows is that old windows with that wonderful wavy glass are thrown out. WAIT!! Did I just say something good about vinyl? A more accurate representation of this is that it's inevitable that some people will make the wrong choice and replace their wonderful wood windows with plastic crap and put the old ones to the side of the road/trash.

I picked up a car-full the other day from in front of a 1920's Bungalow in Middletown. Hard to tell from this picture, but dosen't it look better with the plastic windows? :-P

The total was about 14 sashes. This was taken when I was almost done salvaging the stack.

So here it goes. Find a suitable working surface at a good height. Like so:

Place the sash so you can see the joints on the frame:

Slice along the joint with a saw, I used a jig saw, a hand saw would work, but a Sawzall might be hard to control. I have also used a band saw.

Do your very best to cut just outside the putty line as to miss the glass. It's rough on the glass and the saw blade.

Do this on all four corners.
Then I just slid a scrap of 2X6 along the glass to knock the frame loose from the putty and paint:

It will usually break free nicely:

A nice pile for about 30 minutes work including clean up of the site. I'll deal with cleaning the glass some other day.

Vacek
2 august 2008