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Has anyone taken these handles apart? Now that my window frames are chromed, the handles look pathetic in comparison and need to be done;

The handle and mounting piece assy appear to be retained by a sort of convex ring which is somehow gripping the square shaft. Under that mounting piece is what appears to be a pin -- except there is no hole for it to enter or exit the handle even if it is able to be removed. Not sure how they got it in but assume it is holding the shaft to handle???

This is a junk handle so I'm willing to experiment some but before going all brute force, thought I'd ask if someone has been there done that before with a proven method of disassembly.

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Since no ready made solutions on disassembly were forthcoming, I went ahead and made the mistakes. After some experimenting and mistakes on an old handle, here is the procedure done on a good one to be rechromed.

The pin inside the handle cavity is the retainer. It is a relatively soft pin and can be bent up to clear the handle edge.

GENTLY bend the pin up just enough to clear the edge and to get a vise grip on it. Don't know how much bend it will take so don't overdo and break it. While pulling pin and rotating the vise grips at the same time, the pin will come loose. Does take a bit of pull though.

Once the pin is out, use a block of wood and tap the handle off the shaft. The experimental handle was tight and took alternating blows on each side of the shaft but the second handle came out with tapping just the one squarish larger side shown.

The small mounting piece with screw holes and maybe shaft looks to be different for each handle so it appears to be a good idea to carefully identify each piece as to which handle/door so they can be reassembled properly.

When reassembling, the shaft and hole location will be critical. The chroming process will probably change the size of the square hole in the handle so take care they are lined up before reinserting the pin. It will probably be a looser fit in the hole but bending the pin back down so it's below the handle edge and can't come out will probably be sufficient.

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Thanks for the explanation. Any sections that you don't want plated (like the hole), just ask your plater to fill or wrap them with plater's putty or tape before electroplating.