Super-thin curtain track system

One of the quirks of our house is the extremely tiny clearances between the boxes of our rolling shutters and our fixture frames. This quickly became a minor annoyance as, no matter how many we tested, we could not find a curtain track system whose track would fit within these tiny gaps and still allow our doors and windows to swing unencumbered.

So… We decided to make our own!

The design is based around using a thin aluminum bar as the rail, trading the much greater rigidity of rods and tracks for the bar’s minimal clearance requirements. C-shaped sliding elements “hug” the bar while staying clear of the multiple button-head mounting screws equally spaced along the bar’s length.

The specific bars I have used are 30 mm wide and 2 mm thick, which, for light sheer curtains, required spacing mounting screws not more than 25 cm from one another to keep the bar from bending.

Being fortunate enough to own a 3D printer I designed and printed the sliding elements at home, over the span of a few days. All prints were done at the lowest quality setting, with each layer being 0.3 mm thick, using PLA. Here’s the .OBJ file, produced using TinkerCad. Feel free to use it in your own projects!