Retro Floppy Wall

On Facebook I've seen posts of people covering their walls in old motherboards or CDs or anything like that and I wanted to cover mine with floppy's. I live in an apartment building so I can't just glue them to the wall, I tryed using sticky tack but the disks just kepted falling down, or if they were stuck real well they were peeling off the paint when I pulled them off to do this project, so I decided it would work well to just glue everything to a board. This is what I did to accomplish the goal.

This is really pretty simple project and doesn't require all that many supplies but of course you only a few hundred floppies, a bored, and some glue I used liquid nails from Home Depot, each tube is enugh to cover roughly 8 square feet. one other thing that I didn't photograph that I would recommend having on hand as paper towels to clean up glue that gets on places you don't want it to, also a bowl of water to dampen the paper towels.

I bet we you are wondering "Where the heck do I get this many floppys?" there are several ways, I'll start off with how I got mine. I got mine from several locations, one was the basement of a house that a fend was renting as the previous tenants left LOTS of old computer parts, I also got lots off ctaigslist, I happened to find an add of someone getting rid of hundreds of floppys, most of them with nothing good on them. Another idea is to post a "wanted" add on Craigslist yourself as lots of people have floppy's and don't want them anymore. The last idea I havre is that you can buy bulk broken floppy's from www.floppy.com for resonabley cheap.

It's now time to spread out the glue. Go ahead and squirt glue all over the board and then take a floppy disk and spread the glue out into a thin layer. I found out that if you put floppy's down without speeding out the glue it will squeeze thru all of the holes and get on top and make a mess.

Now that you spread out the glue it is time to lay out the floppy's l. First you need to decide on a pattern, take note that floppy disks are NOT square and are actually rectangular. I just went with a pattern where I had the tabs facing towards each other, but you can face them all in the same direction, switch directions with every row, or just have it random. Start in one corrner if the board and work your way along till you rech the other corner applying force to the disks as you go to make shure that they are secureley atached to the board. You should have something resembling a stair step pattern as you go, this helps keep the disks square to the edge of the board.

Once you have all of the disks layed down you might want to scrap off the glue from arround the edges as you will likely have extra from when you were speeding out the glue. You can use a razor to do this, but I found that using the metal sliding cover on a extra floppy disk works just as well, and it's free! Another option to would be to put it aside to let it dry for a day and then cut off the extra wood. I would recommend using a bandsaw, but if you don't have acess to one just about any saw will work. Make shure though that the teeth count is high and you move slowly so that you cut thrugh and don't rip through, destroying the disks on the edge. You can also just cut thrugh the disks to fit in a specific place like arround cabnets. It is easy to cut thrugh the disks, you can even do that with sharp scissors, but the metal parts can be a bit tricky and might just pop off.

Thanks for reading till the end! Please vote for me in any contests I'm in!