Door Stop for Passenger Slider on Sprinter Camper Van
A handy little hack for optimizing my van.
Looking back, I can't believe we used our van for a year without a door stop for the sliding passenger door. It's one of my favorite tweaks for the van! Most of the Sprinters or other camper vans don't have this as a stock feature unless you ordered it new. Ours didn't, and we decided it was worth looking into, especially with one of our cabinets blocking half the door space. If you don’t have a door stop installed at the factory, it’s a couple hundred bucks +$120/hr for a shop to do it OR a giant pain to retrofit. I opted for the fun of a DIY version.
Design and how it works
My rad brother-in-law Jesse and I designed a two-sided ramp with a divot for the passenger slider wheel in it using a CNC machine. I used old engineering skills from bygone days to sketch out a design and then we used CAD to model the door stop in Solidworks, a 3D design program. This ramp rests right in the main track that the passenger door wheel slides over and works great! The divot is sized to fit the wheel of the passenger door. The door stop is just 3″ long, 1/4" wide and 1/10″ tall, and attaches with JB Weld.
When installed, it provides a perfect way to hold the door in place, even when you're parked at an angle. Plus, you get to choose where you want to install it - anywhere on the sliding surface of the passenger slider track, so it should work with a RAM Promaster, Ford Transit, or any van with a metal sliding surface that the door rolls on. Being able to hold the door only 1/3 open keeps things more private, makes it so the door doesn’t slide all the way shut or open, and keeps wind gusts out while letting a breeze in. A small, easy fix that we love.
The door stop installed on the van rail slide. (Photo from LivingtheVantasy.com.)
How to buy one
Dozens of people have contacted me via email to buy one, but it's not something I'm interested in. Not to worry: Jesse put up a simple order page here, plus wrote an installation manual. He ships the stops with JB Weld, so it shouldn't take more than 5-10 minutes to install one. People on the Sprinter forum dig it, and we've even had unsolicited feedback from people like Jason at LivingtheVantasy.com, who recently wrote an entire post about it (excerpt below):
As soon as I finished reading Dakota’s post, I ordered one on the spot and I cannot believe I owned my Sprinter for so many years without it. Not only was the product excellent, the service that Jesse provided was wonderful and the installation manual/kit he provides is extremely easy to follow. That was about a year and a half ago and I have consciously appreciated the brilliance of this simple doorstop every day.
Hope you enjoy this quick and easy DIY solution! Just a little karma back into the Sprinter world that helped me out so much when I was designing and building our van.