picture hanging and wire

Are these Old-Master-sized pictures with massive frames? I don't have anything like that, so I've always used the common woven nylon string, with some improbable breaking strain. The string is behind the picture so never seen, but of course it's smooth and a perfectly acceptable white.

I suspect this is what you have to do, especially when you have a set of pictures that go together. All our pictures are hung from a picture rail; whenever a room here has been redecorated, our chap has plaster-boarded over the artex ceiling and installed picture rails (or perhaps in effect re-installed them, who knows).

I guess you just have to use more wire than is actually justified, when hanging a picture, thus leaving enough twisted around itself to allow for changes later if required.

I use gripples and catenary wire

I've just hung over fifty family photos on one wall and I have a couple of big, heavy framed maps to go for another. I'm using the picture hanging kits from B&Q because the thin, high carbon pins just slip into the plaster with ease and the single and double pinned hooks have a strength rating (3.5 and 7kg respectively) so I know where I am. Sometimes I get it wrong or we decide to put the pictures in a different arrangement so sometimes I adjust the wires - but also sometimes I just pull the pins out and re-site them. All that's left behind is a tiny little hole - smaller than woodworm - and that's covered over by the picture frame anyway.

Nick

Nick Odell snipped-for-privacy@yahoo.ca wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com:

Ah, the joys of living in a plasterboarded house and not a turn of the (20th) century property with ash filled plaster and skim that wouldn't support a hummingbird's lunchbox :-)

Those strength ratings only apply in PB and not in other media.

For those with crumblies then it has to be picture rails, rail hooks and wires which is no real challenge. For small & medium pics it's a single wire fixed at the picture end and then fixed in a temporary loop at the rail hook until heights are equalised, then finished off. Similar with larger perhaps with a looped wire to each side with adjustment applied there before finishing.

My longstanding hangings<?> are by what appears to be 0.9mm galvanised plant wire.