Home Renovation: Prototype Wall Hanging System for Prints.
Wall hanging system for prints being prototyped in my laundry room — A work in Progress. The goal was to design and build a simple system to display prints on walls in my house, and then deploy the system in many rooms as the house is renovated. I wanted something that would allow me to easily move or change the prints being displayed, and not need to use picture frames, or picture hanging hardware. The first attempt used a map hanging system. This limited me to rows of the same size [letter – 8-1/2″ x 11″; B+ – 13″ x 19″; or C – 17″ x 22″]. One other idea was to hold the prints up with magnets. This was first attempted using parallel strips of flexible 3M magnetic tape attached to the drywall. I tried a number of small magnets, but none were strong enough to hold prints larger than 8 1/2″ by 11″ and especially prints on thick archival papers. Looking for other options I found that cold-rolled steel had a stronger magnetic attraction. For the prototype I mounted thirteen 1″ x 0.125″ x 72″ steel bars on the wall. These were attached by drilling holes in the steel bars and then screwing into the studs behind the drywall. An image of the prototype is shown below. I used a series of different sized images from the day before starting the Spring 2016 Semester at Sea voyage. Future work will be optimizing the placement of the steel bars to work with letter, B+, and C sized prints. The steel bars will be painted the same color as the wall, and the round ceramic magnets will be painted white. Image taken with a Fuji X-T2 camera and 23 mm f/1.4 lens (ISO 200, 23 mm, f/1.4, 1/125 sec) pop-up flash bounced off the ceiling.
