Closet Door Spacers / Guides

A friend was painting and recarpeting some bedrooms, and each room had the same style of sliding closet doors. He found that the plastic spacers or guides on the top of the doors had deteriorated and needed to be replaced. Do you know how many different manufacturers there are for home products? Lots! Do you know how many of them are still in business and supplying spare parts? Almost none! The guy at the hardware store just shook his head.

This is the same friend who specified the custom electrical box last year, so he thought Aha! Roger could make them. In fact, this is exactly the kind of project that got me interested in 3D printing in the first place: making irreplaceable parts. He's an engineer, so he carefully measured the old parts and gave me a detailed drawing. 

These were quite little, just over an inch in the biggest dimension. I put chamfers on all the corners so they would insert easily into the extruded aluminum frames. This view is upside-down: the square part is the "guide" which extends beyond the aluminum frame and keeps it from rattling back and forth.

I decided to print them in Taulman Bridge Nylon, because it is tough (resisting wear) and relatively low friction for moving parts.

I printed about three cycles of samples, refining the width of the insert part and the guide part. 

He needed 12 parts: 2 ends x 2 doors x 3 rooms. As with the previous project, I used Simplify3D's Sequential Print to produce several units per print job. Because the Nylon requires high heat I avoided the cooler areas of my heated bed.