#wall display

Finished building a storage/display... pennant? banner? wall-hanger thing for enamel pins. It is much bigger than I originally intended. Not even sure where this thing will fit. Might have to roll up and clamp the lower half for now. Be a long time until it gets anywhere near filled up anyway.

I made a wall display for my wife’s rock collection. Here’s what it looks like:

My wife likes to collect a small rock from various travels.  She’s always respectful of places that have a strict policy against it, but if there is no policy, she finds one that is characteristic or representative of the location, and for years now has been keeping them in a small tray on a coffee table.  That is okay for now, but in thinking long-term, she needed a bigger display.  

It started with a lumber run to a local sawmill, and I decided to use poplar.  I broke down the boards, then dimensioned them using a jointer, planer, and table saw.

For artistic reasons, I added a chamfer to the front side of all of the boards.

I wanted to use half-lap joinery like this:

So I made a jig that was similar to jigs used for making box/finger joints.

The “peg” slots are at 4 and 6 inches from the dado blade, because that was the height and width of my “cells” in the display.  So, to cut a board (once the height of the blade was dialed in), I placed the end of the board against the peg, made the cut, and then moved the board down so that the slot I just cut was now over the peg.  This ensured me that every notch was spaced exactly the same.

For the perpendicular boards, I moved the peg to the other position and repeated the process.  The dry fit was good, so I messed around with various stains/dyes, and then spent several hours sanding and finishing.

This needed to be REALLY secured into the wall.  I went with 8″ long 3/8″ lag screws.  I spray-painted them black.

These went into studs in the wall, protruding just enough so that the display rested on them and the hex head kept the display from sliding away from the wall.  This makes the display easily movable and adjustable.  They’re not too noticeable, but if you zoom in on the picture, you can see them.  For scale, that’s a 60″ TV it is hanging behind.