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My bedroom door swings open by itself at high speed, which may break the hinges if it's allowed to continue moving beyond the range the door can move freely. To stop it doing this I have some cheap doorstops but the door reaches such a high speed that these gradually move across the floor each time the door opens and generate a loud noise to remind me that they're doing this.

To really stop the door moving I've made an oversized doorstop with some unused fabric and a large quantity of sand. The fabric has a repeating pattern that I wanted to have join up around the circumference so it's in the shape of a cylinder with a diameter of about 22cm. The height is 23cm so that it has enough volume to accommodate a substantial 11kg of sand that shouldn't move easily.

I started with waxed canvas for the inner layer to contain the sand and used a laser cutter to create large circles on paper to cut the materials to size. With an industrial sewing machine on the slowest possible speed I sewed these together into a cylinder leaving a gap to funnel the sand into it.

Filling the fabric with sand through a small funnel hole was difficult because the sand doesn't flow well. I used a drill with a twisted welding rod to encourage the sand to go through the funnel by keeping it clear. With enough vibration from the erratic drill movement the sand moves into the open space of the funnel but it still took 2 hours to completely fill it with sand.

After hand sewing the hole left for the funnel closed I've enclosed the whole thing inside ripstop PVC in the same shape, sealing the sand inside behind two layers of fabric.

Using some patterned cotton warp satin fabric from Electromagnetic Field 2024 I've made a cover for the doorstop. There's a zip down the side and along the bottom to allow the sand-holding inner to be inserted. Making the pattern line up across the zip on the bottom required cutting two of the same circles to allow for some overlap to make seams.

The doorstop stops the door from moving but the impact is moving the doorstop slightly each time.

To stop the door from moving the doorstop I attached rubber to the bottom, but there was still a lot of noise from the impact so I've also put foam inside the cover to absorb it.

The doorstop now no longer moves on impact and the foam disperses a lot of the energy of the moving door so it's much quieter.