Increase grip of blinds cording ?

chalk?

Hmmm, might work - next steps get some chalk :)

FWIW I brushed the plastic rotor out and replaced it and the grip seems to have improved a tad. I suspect there was a little bit of nylon cruft from the cord acting as a lubricant ...

"belt dressing" or "belt slip"?

Thomas Prufer

Violinists use resin to increase the friction of horsehair on gut or steel.

I was puzzled by the dog show reference, so looked it up.

Wikipedia: Cruft is a jargon word for anything that is left over, redundant and getting in the way.

Usenet, for example. :)

It almost always applies to software, either redundant files or whole applications, or on a lower level, chunks of code no longer used by an application.

At either level, it's normal to leave existing things in place when making changes in case of problems with the new stuff, and there is often a lack of urgency in the removal of old stuff when the new stuff is finally trusted.

It also may be considered a bit risky to remove the old stuff in a much-modified system, just in case something somewhere still depends on it, e.g. rename a file rather than remove it, and then never get round to actually deleting it even when nothing breaks after a month or two.

Also to DNA (IIRC). There's a whole lot in there that's basically junk.

Embarrassingly enough, I have some *rosin* from when I played guitar with a violin bow ....

Update:

After buying a £1 box of chalks, I held one against the cords and worked the blinds a few times cutting a notch in the chalk.

All seems well now, but in typical "Would you believe it ?" fashion the temperatures have jumped (back) to 10C outside and the problem only seemed to happen when it was quite a bit colder (like snowing).