Sliding door half-way stop

We ordered the factory door stop for opening the sliding door half way. It intrudes above the door frame in a place we want to run lighting. We bought a replacement that is elegant in its simplicity.

Adding the half-way door stop at the time we built out the van wasn’t too expensive, and we knew we’d want that functionality. The option is T12, Sliding Door, 2-stage opening.

What we didn’t know was that the door stop is a big, greasy, spring-loaded wheel that sits inside the van above the sliding door area. It wasn’t really a problem until we decided to run coving from front-to-back to hide our lighting and wires. Sure, we could have boxed the mechanism in, but we knew there was another option.

Dakota, author of the Traipsing About sprinter blog designed a door stop for his van along with his brother-in-law Jesse. Now Jesse sells them through his company, Norton Fabrications.

The aluminum piece is *tiny*. That’s a centimeter scale in the photo below. It’s 6.5cm long (2-and-a-bit inches). In the envelope that the door stop came in, there was also a little slip of paper saying “Don’t worry, I didn’t forget to pack the door stop, it’s attached to the popsicle stick in the packaging to protect it.” If I hadn’t seen the note, I may indeed have worried.

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The door stop attaches with VHB (Very High Bond) tape. It’s a two minute installation job. So far, it’s been holding up to the typical Pacific North West weather just fine.

The new door stop has a different feel to the factory-original one. It’s not as abrupt. It seems to work just as well on slopes. The added benefit is that you can decide exactly where you want the stop point to engage. If, like us, you have a cabinet in the sliding door space, you can now make it so that the door opens just to the edge of the cabinet.

5 Replies to “Sliding door half-way stop”

  1. Good idea. I would really like to see a photo of the factory stop that you describe as being in the way of your interior finish.

    1. Julie, it looks like we never took a picture of the factory stop before we removed it. It’s hidden behind the stock headliner in a crew or passenger van, but it sticks out from the area above the sliding door opening by a couple of inches.

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