how to make a whiteboard?

[Peter Lynch]

Basically it's just a sheet of ply with a plastic laminate on the front. Anyone know what is the best plastic to use & where to get some

thanks Pete

[john2]

Why not just buy a whiteboard. They start at £24 for 1.2m square approx.

john2

[Peter Lynch]

Well I have looked at them in the shops & online and may well end up buying one. But this _is_ a DIY group :-) and since I already have the backing board, I reckon sticking a sheet of (sticky back?) plastic over the top would be a lot easier, plus I get the size I want and can tart it up with hardwood borders, customised pen-holders etc.

Pete

[john2]

well, given an endless supply of DIY jobs that would fill 25 hrs/day I would just pick the money saving ones like building/plumbing etc.

john2

[dcbwhaley]

No! No! No! For a true DIYer the primary motive is not to save money but to produce unique items or items of better quality than you can buy: or to do a better job than the professionals :-)

[VisionSet]

Then there are those like me who live in old houses where the primary source of motivation is to still have a roof over ones head.

-- Mike W

[dingbat]

Usually steel actually, so that magnets stick.

Buy it, from a S/H office place. Making a usably good whiteboard is hard -- I certainly don't know how to do get as good a surface/

[Andrew Mawson]

hrs/day I

No not at all! The primary motivation is that if you don't do it no one else will do it unless you give them endless supplies of beer tokens. And even then they rarely turn up when arranged.

When I bought my first house (Victorian two up / down condemned as unfit for human habitation) it was a VERY step learning curve and I found out things that I never knew I didn't know ! Now 34 years and 4 houses later at least I know the complexity of most reconstruction works and have done them personally.

AWEM

[Phil Anthropist]

Many years ago when I was re-decorating our bathroom and didn't want to tile around the bath (I didn't want to tile onto plasterboard then be expected to hack the tiles off the next time I decorated [bloody women] because they were too small or too big or didn't match the new paint or whatever) I found some sheets of white plastic in a timber merchants that were meant for fixing to walls to provide a waterproof finish. They came in 8' x 4' flexible, about an eighth of an inch thick, flexible and soft enough to be cut with scissors. They are still there now and if I had a whiteboard pen handy I would see if it writes on and rubs off OK, but I haven't. So it might be worth visiting a builders/timber merchant and looking around the sheet materials section for white plastic panels. Take a whiteboard pen with you for testing but don't write anything rude. Good luck with this project.

[Alex Coleman]

A white board seems to be a bit more than just that.

If I take my whiteboard markers and write on my pre-made whiteboard then the letters rub off.

But if I do that on my fridge's white metal exterior then I have to use a solvent to shift the marks properly.

Maybe it's a combo of my fridge and those markers but it showed me that a whiteboard is not just a bit of shiny white stuff.

[Peter Lynch]

Yes, this is my main concern. It seems there's a trick to getting exactly the right coating. It must be hard enough that the pens don't stain it, yet they must still "wet" the surface so that the ink sticks. Hence my question.

I think I'm going to have to yield and buy a commercial board, then take it apart to get at the whiteboard material itself.

Pete

[The3rd Earl Of Derby]

How big? look at the info on his ebay page,he will cut to size.

[sm_jamieson]

The best ones are apparently steel with a ceramic coating. I guess it needs to be a non-porous substances that is microscopically flat. The ones I got from Staples office supplier do not dry-wipe all that well, and often water has to be used - they seem to have a simple plastic coating, or the magnetic one is simple paint on steel. Also, I think the pens are just as important as the surface. Simon.