Hello!


Shower curtains are often hanged on a kind of telescopic rod that can
be clamped between two walls. The rod can be extended to a size
slightly larger than the distance between the walls. Then a spring
inside, can be compressed to clamp the rod between the 2 walls.


The way this works (at least for some systems): the rod consists of 2
tubes, one of slighly smaller diameter inside a larger one. There is a
kind of star shaped nut (how else to describe it?) inside the large
tube, that has 'arms' slightly bent to one side (see image). When
pushed in one direction along the tube, the arms slightly bend away
from the tube wall, allowing the nut to move. When pushed in the
other direction, the arms are pushed up against the wall, which
prevents the nut from moving. The spring is connected to the nut on
one side, pusing it in the blocking direction, and the inner rod is
connected to the spring. This allows one to fix the size of the
telescopic rod to the desired length, but still allowing the entire
thing to be compressed slighly with the spring. Thus the rod can be
clamped between 2 walls. The rod can be made longer by sliding the
inner tube out until it has the desired length. To make the entire rod
shorter again, one has to pull out the inner tube all the way and
insert it again on the other side of the outer tube. So, yes I found
this to be quite an ingenious system.


Now my question: is this kind of 'nut' a standard hardware item? I'm
not an english native speaker and I have no idea what to look for.
What is it called? I did find 'star nuts' used in bikes, but those
seem to have a fixed position in the tube. The reason I need to know:
for my application I need a similar system, but one that is a bit
sturdier than shower curtains. So I need to make something myself. My
tubes will be about 1.5-2 inches in diameter.


Thnx
Attached Images




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