Picture Wall Project

I've been thinking about doing a project like this for sometime, but I finally did it over the past few weeks. It took a little trial and error, but I'm pleased with the final results.

The desire was to provide a cheap and easy way to display a bunch of my photos in my house. I decided that hanging them like they do in darkrooms on cables would look pretty cool so that's the idea I started with. Darkrooms tend to use bulldog clips so I tried that first. It worked well but I wanted a cleaner look and I found some people on the internet that were using magnets to hold up pictures. I tried probably 4 or 5 clips and magnet combinations and eventually decided that just mounting the pictures to matboard and then gluing some washers to the matboard was my favorite. The magnets hold the metal cable to the washers on the matboard. The reason for the washers is so that when I replace the pictures I just have 1 cent washers on the matboard that I can throw away.

In my first attempt I used two sided sticky tape to adhere the washers to the matboard and I used very small magnets. This led to a catastrophic failure. When I left all my pictures were on the wall and when I came back home I found nearly all the pictures were on the ground. After scratching my head for awhile I realized that one of the washers had come undone and that picture had hit the cables below it and that wiggled the cable in a way that shook every last picture off (stupid harmonics). The solution to this was to use real glue to hold the washers to the matboard (I used Goop) and to buy stronger magnets. I went with some 30 cent thin cylinder magnets that had 12 pounds of force from KJmagnetics. These two changes seemed to fix the problem and my pictures have been hanging there for about a week now.