DIY Poster Hanger

In this post I am going to show you how I made this DIY poster hanger made with walnut and held together with magnets. I saw this idea at a coffee shop while I was out of town. They were selling small posters with with a magnetic frame and I thought that I could replicate this with a little larger poster. The cool thing about this is you can change the poster out without having to drill or unscrew anything and you won’t damage your poster which is pretty cool. Of coarse I had to make a coffee poster to go in the hanger but you can add whatever you want. This is a very simple project that you can do in a day.

Materials

• (4) strips of walnut OR
• ½ x 2 poplar from home center Home Depot
• Rare Earth magnets https://amzn.to/2k8Hx4X
• Danish oil https://amzn.to/2Lc2AQh
• 5 minute epoxy https://amzn.to/2L9Iiqx
• Rope or twine https://amzn.to/2IsTd0M
• Poster

TOOLS

• Circular Saw http://amzn.to/2znPWrd
• Planer
• Table Saw https://amzn.to/2IN0NPG
• Chisel https://amzn.to/2KB4ngz

• Router https://amzn.to/2qqQbP3

• Random orbital sander https://amzn.to/2qTaOEw

The first thing I you will have to do is cut the boards you are using into strips. You can use whatever type of wood you want and make them whatever size you want. The final dimensions of my strips were ½” thick/ 1” wide/ 22” long and I was adding a poster that was 20”x30”. You can actually purchase wood that is already cut into strips that are a usable size and all you would need to do is cut them to length. For mine, I had a piece of walnut that I wanted to use. First I planed down the board to get the roughness off. Then I used a jointer jig that I made for my table saw to get one side of board straight. Then I could use the table saw to square up the other side. Once my board was square I cut the board into 1” strips on the table saw and then planed the strips down to ½” thick. After that I cut the boards to length using a circular saw.

There are a few different ways you can go about this. This took two tries to get the desired fit for my magnets. Each time I tried a different method. The first time I used thicker ⅜” magnets so I used a drill to get out most of the hole by putting a piece of tape on a drill bit so I wouldn’t go too deep. Then I used a chisel to clean it up and get the corners of the hole a little better. The magnets I used for the first attempt were not strong enough, so I purchased some rare earth magnet strips from Amazon. This is 100% the way to go for this. They were significantly stronger. They were a little different in size. Much more shallow and longer so I decided to use a router to make the hole for these and then clean it up with a chisel also. Either method for cleaning out the hole for the magnets will work. I would do either again and it would probably depend on the size of the magnet.

To install the magnets I used 5 minute epoxy. I just mixed it up, put it in the hole, and then put in the magnet. Make sure you pay attention to which direction the magnets are facing when you are doing this. And also make sure the magnets are level. The first attempt at this, my magnets were not very level and it didn’t make a good connection with the other magnet when I was testing it out.

The next thing I had to do was prepare the boards for finish. I actually sanded the boards before I installed the magnets and started with 120 grit sandpaper and ended using 220 grit paper. After this I added the finish. I decided to use danish oil on the wood strips. This is my favorite finish to add to walnut because it makes the grain pop like crazy. I love the way it looks. For the first version of this project, I added finish before the magnets and for the second version I added finish after installing the magnets. Either way is fine, but I liked adding the finish after installing the magnets better, just because you can clean up some of the epoxy before adding the danish oil on it.

After the strips were finished, the main part of the project was complete. Next all you need to do is add your poster and your string to hang. For the poster, I decided to make my own design using photoshop. I have the design I made available for free on my website if you are interested using it as your poster. It is 20”x 30”, but it can scale down if you need a different size. I got mine printed at my local print shop.

To hang the poster, I used a piece of twine. I tied a knot on each end and then put it between the boards behind the poster. The force of the magnets holding the boards together keeps the string secure. This method worked better than I thought it would. After the string was attached, I could hang the poster and the project was complete!

Be sure to check out the video for the entire process. It was very simple to make. Also, you can download the poster file I used for free by clicking here. Thank for checking this out. I hope it is useful for you.

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