No-Holes Poster/Quilt Hanger

By Sean Michael Ragan
Category: Furniture
Time Required: 1 hour
Difficulty: Moderate

I’m a great admirer of Jørgen Møller’s Posterhänger design. It’s great for those in-between prints that are too valuable to put thumbtacks through, but not valuable enough to have framed. Plus it’s considerably cheaper than framing, and looks a lot better than thumbtacks. Plus, it’s easier on your walls, requiring only a single hole to hang a poster of any size. I own six of them myself.

But they’re not perfect. The black rubber end-caps are easy to lose and hard to replace, as are the white plastic clamps that actually grip the poster and slide into the aluminum tubes. What’s more, I have one poster which, due to whatever combination of size, weight, and thickness, a Posterhänger will not support. I came home three times to find it lying on the floor. The problem, I realized, was that the plastic clamps did not grip the poster hard enough, and it was slipping out.

It eventually occurred to me to replace the plastic clamps with binder clips with the wire handles removed, which have much greater gripping power owing to their spring steel construction. My balloon rapidly deflated, however, when I realized that even if I used the smallest binder clips available (3/4″), they would not fit into the aluminum tube that came with my Posterhänger. Using binder clips would require remaking the whole system. Too bad, so sad. Maybe someday, right?

Now fast forward to last week, when my Moms presented me with this nifty quilted portrait of, ah, myself. Normally I wouldn’t hang pictures of me on my own walls, but hey, it’s from my Moms, and I want to display it, preferably without damaging it in any way. Seemed like the perfect opportunity to try my hand at DIY posterhängering.

Parts
/
Tools

Countersink
Drill
File
Marker
Rotary saw blade
Table saw
Tape measure
Tubing cutter
Twist drill bit
Wire

Steps

Step #1: Measure and mark tubing

Measure two identical lengths of aluminum tubing, each of which is at least as long as the top (and, presumably, the bottom) of your art. I allowed an inch overage at each end, which still looks fine and leaves a little fudge room.
Mark the midpoint of each section to locate the hole drilled in step 3.

Conclusion

The original posterhänger design included rubber plugs to close the ends of the tubes. These are aesthetic and not necessary, in my opinion, but if you like them it should be easy to find black rubber stoppers that will fit the ends of the tubes nicely. You'll need a bit of extra length at each end, of course, so you don't end up squishing the corners of your poster.

There is no particular reason why the tube has to be round. In fact, most hardware stores also carry a 3/4"square aluminum tubing along with the round, and using it could make this project a lot simpler. It'd be easier to drill the mounting hole on-center, for one, and more importantly, it'd no longer be necessary to install the temporary hardware required to keep the round tube from rotating during cutting.

Finally, since this entry first posted, a helpful commenter has pointed out that there is, in fact, one smaller standard size of binder clip than I thought. These "mini" binder clips are only 9/16" wide, and I have tested and verified that they do, in fact, fit into a standard posterhänger tube. So if you're having slipping problems or have lost the plastic clips that came with your posterhänger, "mini" binder clips will make an effective replacement.