How to Repair a Broken Rolling Window Shutter.

If you live in a house or flat with rolling shutters then you’re probably familiar with the problem of a fallen shutter that you can’t raise.

There are 2 common causes:

1. The webbing strap which raises the blind has worn and broken.
2. The blind has separated from the drum which it rolls around.

Today we are dealing with the second of these 2 causes.

This type of failure is common in old shutters.

The plastic becomes brittle with age and prone to breaking.

Here we can see that the top lamina has broken at the point of attachment to the drum.The shutter then fell shut.

This is how we go about repairing the broken shutter:

1. Drill out the pop rivets and open the exterior plastic flap. This allows you to get access to the roller mechanism/ drum.

2. Wind the drum into the “down” position. If you forget to do this you will not be able to wind the shutter back up once repaired.

3. Remove the webbing straps which connect the blind to the roller drum ( self-tapping metal screw)

4. Carefully raise the shutter in the guides until the broken lamina is free to be disconnected from the second lamina. The plastic laminas slot together and can be easily slid apart.

5. Take the broken lamina to your local hardware shop and buy a replacement cut to the same size. (In this case we didn’t buy a replacement lamina since the remaining laminas were enough to allow the shutter to close properly. When the next lamina down breaks we’ll buy 2 replacements! Sometimes when the roller blind slams shut other brittle laminas also break and need to be replaced. This is easy to do since the laminas simply slide together.)

6. The replacement lamina slides into place.

7. Slide the 2 attachment straps onto the top lamina.

8. Screw the attachment straps to the drum and wind the roller shutter up and down to make sure that everything works correctly.


9. Close the plastic flap and secure it in place either with Pop Rivets (as original) or if you don’t have a rivet gun you may prefer to use self-tapping screws (as we have here).

10. Job done!