A customer in Bourne End got in touch through a recommendation about a large sliding bathroom door that was on its last rollers. I had replaced sliding-door roller systems before, so at first I wondered how difficult this one could really be.
Quite difficult, as it turned out.
The door was large, heavy and top-hung, and every time it moved it was grinding against the floor. The bottom guide had been installed crooked with a generous amount of silicone, and one of its fixing screws did not even have a wall plug, so it was contributing absolutely nothing.
The parts were unusually difficult to identify. After several hours of research, I managed to contact the manufacturer and discovered that they had one final roller set left on the shelf.
The cause of the grinding then made sense. A plastic protector around one of the rollers had worn away and cracked, leaving the bearing exposed. The door had dropped several millimetres, bringing it into contact with the floor, while the upper mechanism was also interfering with the roller guide.
The replacement roller set arrived a couple of days later. I fitted it to the manufacturer’s torque specification, cleaned the floor guide and added plugs to the existing fixing holes. I deliberately reused those holes rather than drilling new ones because there was underfloor heating below and I was not going to gamble with that.
Once everything was reassembled and adjusted, the door was sitting at the correct height again and sliding smoothly without grinding across the floor.
