Hi Sarabr. These days I live in a 192Os Tudorbethan apartment full of mahogany furniture & antique fabrics, but in 1978 I moved into my very first post-college place, a 194O Streamlined Moderne apartment, where the floors were terrazzo, the stair rails were Monel metal and the windows were either glass block or steel casemements. In fact. those steel casements--at 12 feet, they were the widest windows in Peoria--were the reason I rented the apartment in the first place. Unfortunately, I signed the lease during a particulary mild week in late October, and within a month, I was shivering & miserable because the rusted windows wouldn't close all the way and the half-inch gaps between the corroded frames & the corroded windows turned my apartment into a howling, screaming wind tunnel. Thank heaven for steam heat. Somehow, I survived the winter, but when it warmed up in the spring I knew I had to do something. Unfortunately, my landlord didn't think my measly $175 per month rent justified his spending the time & money to restore my beautiful but rusty windows. That was the bad news, The good news was he was even too cheap to replace them with lumberyard double-hungs, the way another slumlord had destroyed the beauty of the streamline apartments across town. When he suggested stapling plastic over my windows, I knew the guy was insane. My walls were solid concrete. So, since I loved my place, and I loved my windows, I rehabbed them mmyself. Of course, I had no idea what I was doing and all my useless pals said I was crazy for putting my time & money on somebody else's building, but I was determined to bring the place back to the glamour it had had when it was new, and besides, what did my friends know? They had plaid couches, for pete's sake. Anyway, it was mostly just a matter of getting rid of a few decades worth of accumulated paint layers and/or surface rust, and also the windblown grit that had built up and hardened in the windows' frames and made it impossible to close them all the way. So, using a heavy duty scraper, a grinder attachment for my Buck Rogers-style drill, some wire brushes, a few cans of WD-40 & glazing compound black Rustoleum, I managed to get all but one of my casements working smoothly again, and when I finally got that one closed, I screwed it shut. When I was done, my windows looked good as new. Yes, it was a huge pain, and because I was a stupid kid, I probably lost a bunch of IQ points from breathing lead-paint dust without a mask, but--what was I saying?--the end result was worth it. Installing new wood casements would have been simpler, but they would have also been a lot more expensive than muddling through with my old windows, and more inmportantly, the thick sections of the wooden frames would have destroyed the sleek horizontal lines of the originals. As it turned out, the windows ended up looking so good that when I moved out, my landlord more than doubled the rent for the next tenant, a small ad agency, and they liked the place & the windows so much they not only stayed for 2O years, they kept my gray-&-black decor intact and ordered new furniture to match. So sure, you can replace your windows with wood, or you can spend a little more and have them restored to like-new condition, but if you do it right, you can probably restore most of them yourself. You may have to replace a few on the rear of your place, so that they can serve as replacement parts, but even if it's a job that turns out to be beyond your skills, at least give it a thought. Regards, MAGNAVERDE.

If your selling you might just want to take your chances and let the next owner deal with it. It's difficult to tell a non-professional how to install something we can't see. From the OP, he never mentioned a steel pan system, so I'm not sure if he's talking about leaving the steel pan in and installing on top of that - in which case the pan will still transmit cold from the outside to the inside. However, he might be talking about leaving the narrow steel frame of the casement - sometimes these are finned into the block walls, sometimes screwed into a hidden wood frame. If they are finned they can be a nightmare to remove. I can see that if this is the case, and there is no steel pan, that the opening could be lined/framed with 1x6 or 2x6 and then the new window installed in the wooden frame. Then the exterior could be wrapped with aluminum over the old steel frame. Hope I didn't just confuse the whole issue. Trying to understand what is existing. If there is indeed a steel pan system, I would definitely remove that by tugging and cutting and get it out. Though I've seen it done with it in, and it is a heck of a lot easier, it isn't really the right way to do it.

Windows on Washington is a highly regarded contributor here, and I'd highly recommend contacting them. They offer the top performing products of various types, and run an excellent operation... You will not regret contacting them, guaranteed.

Clayton, If you are organized and get all your parts and pieces together, you can somewhat turn it into production work. Probably means the first one is going to take a day to do and subsequent units will speed up. Keep us posted how it goes. You might want to contact a mobile media blasting company to see what they can do on site.