Spotted during Autumn Window Cleaning:
That’s the compression spring inside the curtain rod over the kitchen sink, intended to push the ends against the cabinets on either side. The screw slides along the outer rod and when tightened, backstops the spring against the inner rod.
The end of the spring is apparently intended to twist and jam inside the inner half of the rod, but that seemed so … unesthetic.
Being in the midst of setting up a Windows 11 box for the laser cutter, I used it as an excuse to fiddle with the RDP configuration to get LightBurn running in full screen mode on the monitor atop my desk; more about all that later.
The little pusher block is a hull around a pair of circles the same diameter as the smaller dimension of the inner rod, spaced apart enough to match its width, then laser-cut from a scrap of 1/4 inch acrylic:
Which assembles as you’d expect:
The spring seems much happier pushing against the block, doesn’t it?
Admittedly, this was completely unnecessary, but if you think of it as a side effect of the Win 11 thing, it makes at least a little sense.
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 
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One response to “Curtain Rod Spring Pusher Block”
My cynical self thinks it was probably designed with a block, but then someone figured out that it also worked without it, they saved a cent and the CEO got a new boat.