I've had a very enjoyable weekend. I've been fairly productive, have played a little Ultimate, gone for two separate runs, and finished a lot of homework.
As a break from studying this evening, I decided to tackle the ultimate engineering challenge: hanging posters armed only with painters' tape. For those of you who don't know of the stuff, painters' tape is that blue masking-tape-like tape. It didn't take me long to find out why it's favored by painters -
it doesn't stick to walls. No wonder, then, that it's the administration's sticky-material-of-choice for dorm rooms at Harvey Mudd. As an example of how bad it is at holding posters up, take a look at this first, naive attempt at hanging:
That didn't work. At all. By that I mean that it fell down within ten seconds of being stuck to the wall. This stuff is
that not sticky. This problem got me thinking. It stuck to the posters just fine, it just fell off the wall with hardly a second thought.
'Aha!' I thought, 'perhaps I can help it stick to the wall.' That I did. Here's my step-by-step method, in the hopes that it will help someone, somewhere, stick a poster to the wall using not-sticky tape.
Step 1: Long piece of tape
After getting rid of any dust on the wall with a damp rag, take a pretty long piece of tape and stick half of it to the wall. The remaining half should dangle off, on the side that forces of nature and evil will be fighting. That is, if you're fighting gravity, the top half should be dangling. If you're trying to prevent a corner from pulling away to the right, the left half should be dangling. If you're fighting anti-gravity...send me a blueprint for how you got that working and I'll share the Nobel prize with you.
Pretty simple so far.
Step 2: Prevent the dangling end from just dragging the rest of the tape off the wall with it.
This is done by putting another piece of tape perpendicular to the first, across it. Really, a picture will tell it best.
Then, crease the first piece so that there's a sharp edge right at the edge of the second piece. This will make the next few steps a lot easier. This setup on its own would work fairly well, but if your poster has any non-negligible weight, it might tear the second piece, drag the first off the wall, and fall down anyway. There are two weak points: on either side of the first piece, on the top edge of the second. We'll reinforce those next.
Step 3: Reinforce those weak points!
Next, you need to place two more pieces of tape parallel and right next to the first. These will reinforce the areas of the second piece most likely to tear. Again, a picture will tell it best.
Hooray! This, again, should work on its own, but it doesn't hurt to put one more piece of tape across those two to further reinforce the whole system.
Step 4: One more reinforcement
In this step, you place one last piece of tape parallel to the second piece, and across the third and fourth, to reinforce the weaker points there.
Hooray! You're done! Well, actually...you probably still want to hang your poster. If it's a width-wise or less-than-light poster, you probably want to make another one of these, just to be safe. It's a good idea to distribute the weight.
So...
Step 5: Repeat
Now, finally, you can hang your poster. Make sure the dangly bits are mostly where you want them to be, and then...
Step 6: Victory!
Step 7: Just to be safe
You've put so much work into this, it would be a shame for it to be less-than-utterly-perfect. Just to be safe, put a little roll of tape at each corner. These won't be supporting much weight, so the painters' tape will hold. Hopefully. Also, if your poster is
really heavy, you might want to consider double-reinforcing the whole thing by repeating steps two through four.
I may or may not have spent upwards of an hour and a half doing this tonight. Most of that was for one poster. A giant (not quite full-size, fortunately, but pretty big) map of the world. I've historically had a lot of trouble getting this map to stay attached to a wall, so I really went all-out for it. There are 11 of these setups, all double-reinforced, behind the main body of the map, along with a roll at three of the corners and an additional sideways setup at one particularly persistent corner. Here is the proof that it has stayed put for at least long enough for me to get down off my bed and snap a picture of it:
I was also able to reuse the tape from my original failed attempt. At first, it went into the Pile of (Not-Quite-) Everlasting Doom:
Eventually, though, I found a better use for it. These tiny little rolls of tape, while not strong enough to hold a poster, were more than enough for my mini-posters. Each of these was a picture on some date from a family calendar a few years ago. They work beautifully on my 'poster wall.'
All in all, a very enjoyable study break.
