Saturday, 15 September 2012

Guided By The Blinds

A job I had always intended on doing, was finishing off my window frames with 'fills' or 'guides' for my blinds on the back of the frames.
This would have two purposes, the first, to guide the blinds down and prevent them from moving side to side, and secondly any gap that was viewable from the outside while the blinds were down, would be blocked.
Well, as I have been using Nina since they have been done, one of the blinds has been a bit of a headache, the one on the sliding door, because each time I slide the door shut, the Blind swings violently from side to side, sometimes twisting out of the frame and creasing, and sometimes, the plastic weight on the bottom, which slides onto the fabric, and is held in position by a plastic cap on either end, well the plastic caps sometimes pop out and then the bottom plastic trim/weight slides out and gets trapped in the door when I close it.
You can probably get a better idea what I am talking about from this photo -




Here you can see how much room it has either side to swing once the frame is on.
This is the damage that is being caused to the blind by its bashing against the frame and twisting -




Thats some nasty fraying :(. These blinds were SO expensive (£5 each for these smaller ones :P) that I really dont want to have to replace them anytime soon !
So I took the frame off, along with the blind, laid it down flat, set the blind bang in the centre, and marked the edges where the wooden battens had to run to give enough space to fit glue some carpet to finish it off, but also close enough to stop the blind moving side to side enough to allow it to come outside of the frame completely.




This is the frame with the battens nailed on, short enough to fit between the upper and lower wooded frames I have fixed to the metal on the door, and just right for the blinds.




A little close up showing it is in fact a 'guide' and sporting my rather fancy pencil marks :P.
Once the frame was fitted back on, I am happy to say it all fitted back together with the new wood, so I didnt have to adjust anything :).




You can just about see the new guides in this next photo, doing its job superbly !




I can slam the side door shut now, even with the blind down, and there is no movement whatsoever, and the blind stays in the down position which is going to be really handy for parking up and dropping the blinds to stop any would be thieves seeing in. Will keep Nina a bit cooler inside too, even though the tinted windows cut out a lot of the heat of the sun anyway.
One thing I did realise with this blind, is that there is no room at the top to fit an LED blue light bar to match all my other downlighters on each of the other blinds, so need to think of something. Only today I found a sliding door contact switch that will allow power to reach the lights when the door is in the closed position, from the main vehicle body.
Now, for all you media hungry people, a little treat for you now, I did a small video explaining the above stuff in my insanely boring Bristolian accent and ACTUALLY showing the door being shut and the blind not moving ! WOW, you is so lucky ;).


Thanks for looking again, this blog would be pointless without you lot reading it, not that many of you comment to let me know you are reading, but I can see from the page stats in Blogger :P
Please do leave comments, they really do spur me on.
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Location:Gloucester

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