Following from my earlier post about mounting artwork, I tried an experiment or two.

Photo corners

As the photo corners seemed like the best solution, I mounted six “captures” on a board with them.

As day later, some of the corners had failed. The warp in the “captures” is too much, even for the industrial glue in the corners. Zut!

Pins

A quick test of some pins, pushed into medium-density polystyrene.

This works, just, but is a bit fiddly, and there’s a danger that the pins will eventually be pulled out by some of the more excessively warped “captures” (despite my best effort to flatten then in a book press)… after all, I wasn’t expecting the photo corner mounts to fail, and they did.

Thoughts

Back to the drawing board!

Clamping System

So, back to the alternate idea of using a clamping system.

Cue thoughts of designing something and having it manufactured using 3D printing or Stereolithography depending on the final material.

I have never been happy with 3D design software — things like sketchup just don’t do it for me. After a bit of searching I found something that does do it for me: OpenSCAD — a 3D modeller, but parametric and driven by code. I like writing code.

After an hour or so getting too grips, I came up with a couple of concept designs (potentially patentable).

Armed with these designs I obtained some quotes to see how much these would cost to manufacture. Eeks! Technically feasible, but I’ll need to do some optimisation to the design to keep the costs down… and trying to work out the optimisation is a bit of a black art (a tedious combination of material choice, then size, which determines the machine, which impacts the setup fees, and so on).

Perhaps I am making life too difficult and I should just stick the original mSpN set artworks to the wall with bluetack?!

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