Repairing original closet doors
We need to repair both the track and hangers/sliders on our original closet doors. If anyone (in Sunnyvale, Mountain View, Los Altos or Palo Alto) is replacing their original closet doors and would like to dispose of them, or knows a source that has replacement parts, please reply. Thanks.
In my home (Fairglen tract, San Jose), the original track and sliders were all wood (with the exception of the metal floor guide). As you can imagine, wood on wood is not the smoothest slide and with 40 years of constant use and little care, the doors no long worked. Homeowners frustrated with their hard-to-use sliding doors often often thought replacement of the complete setup--doors included. Fortunately, our home's previous owners just put the doors in the garage and never got around to replacing them.
Here's the good news: it turns out, you can marry modernday steel sliding door hardware with the original shoji-style door. You retain the look but improve the functionality.
If you are interested, we used the Stanley brand Sliding Door Hardware Set which contains a steel track and hangers (we bought the 60" width for our closet openings) . The track fits doors up to 1 3/8" thick, our original sliders are 1" so we were fine from that perspective. The hangers packaged with the hardware set weren't quite the size we needed so we purchased different ones separately (7/16" offset, I believe).
The general instructions are pretty straightforward but you will have to do some drawings and measurements to decide exactly what dimensions everything needs to be. And trial fit as much as you can as you go.
Good luck. Perhaps someone else who has done this can provide additional insights.
Jake
P.S. One last thing, the biggest problem we ran into was that the closet door openings were (no longer) square so we had to decide what we could fix and what we could live with. You might or might not run into the same problem.
