CurtPalme.com Home Theater Forum

[lyd]

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In the interest of sharing, I thought I would take a moment summarize my attempts at building a Wilsonart Designer White-based screen. It has pretty much sucked so far. This is a cautionary tale.

First off, buy the thickest grade they make. This is where my trouble started. The Home Despot woman insisted that what she was selling me (8 x 10, special ordered) was the stuff I needed, and the thicker stuff was for "industrial use". Bah. I wound up with the thinnest grade they have, suitable only for gluing to a full substrate.

Second, get it shipped flat if you can, or pick it up immediately and get it unrolled somewhere flat and warm if you can't.

Third, build your frame on something dead level (well, ok, dead flat -- level doesn't really matter). If you don't have a flat surface, and can't create one, then go find one. If the frame is not perfectly square and flat you are screwed.

Fourth, and related to the above, get completely flat and true materials. Wood if you can find it (I couldn't), something else if not.

I didn't do any of these things, twice so far, and I have a screen with monstrously big waves in it.

I started with the laminate, which had been rolled up in my kitchen for almost two weeks, and some 8' 1"x3" strapping lumber. I built a frame, butt-jointed and fastened with metal L-brackets. Then I unrolled the laminate, and got my first surprise. This material has a memory like crazy. It really wanted to stay rolled up.

I clamped it down to a long 2x6 along the edge I needed to cut, measured and snapped lines, then cut it with a circular saw and a plywood blade. That worked fine.

Then I laid it down over my frame and tried to press it flat, with the help of a friend, to get an idea of what sort of fastening I would need to do to the edges. Total abortion. There was just a crazy amount of warping in the laminate. We spent a very long time messing with it, trying differrent things, with no real change. Finally we screwed down the top edge, in the long-shot hope that we could then stand it vertical and smooth the waves out while we fastened the rest. No such luck, it was a bust.

We decided that the problem was the slight warp in the long top and bottom pieces (I picked the flattest ones I could find), so went back to the Borg for some better wood. The best they had was some Poplar, and it was not that much better. It did come in 10' lengths, though, so I bought a couple and headed back home. Dissasembled the frame, ditched the horizontals, re-cut everything, this time with mitred corners, and rebuilt it with heavier L-brackets. It seemed much sturdier and was at least somewhat more flat. Here's a pic of the frame MK II. You can see the laminate in the background, and my blurry friend in the foreground.



Laying the laminate down on it yielded much the same results. After much more fooling around, we decided that the problem might be the open frame allowing the laminate to sag, so we laid down a bunch of scrap wood in the center.



This did help with the sagging, but didn't come close to eliminating the waves. Even flat on the floor, the laminate seemed permanently wavified. Huge drag.

A lot more time was spent (this whole episode lasted two days), adding vertical supports among other things, but nothing we did helped and in the end we needed to get on to other things, namely mounting unistrut and hanging the projector, so we screwed it on as best we could and I resolved to deal with it later. (Projector hanging went fine, btw.)

You can see some of the currently hung, totally flawed version in this image,



At this point, I have purchased some 4x8 sheets of 1/8" hardboard, some 1" square aluminum tube, wood dowels for inside the tube, laminate glue and the various tools for doing that (more wood dowels, j-roller, roller for applying the glue, etc., and (what the hell) a 10" Ryobi mitre saw.





The plan is to build a new frame out of the aluminum, designed with both vertical and horizontal cross-bracing and assembled on a leveled and squared platform made from several adjustable work-stands, cover that with three panels of the hardboard, then glue the laminate to the hardboard. This should get me a flat screen, at last. I have since realized that the hardboard is going to bow under the heavy pressure with the J-roller required for the glueing process, so I am also going to need to cut some panels of 1" material, of some sort, to place underneath and between the supports while I glue.

Good grief.

The end result should be pretty nice, but wow, what a pain this turned into. A smarter guy would have immediately ordered a new piece of laminate when he saw the root problem, or maybe just said the heck with it and ordered some real screen material. Ah well, no one ever accused me of genius.

I'll post with the results, and take more pictures of the whole process this time, but in the meantime I hope all my bad purchases and bad planning save someone a bit of trouble.

Someday I can go back to learning how to set up my projector again!

lyd

[Joust]

Chris N, had similar problems. He glued his to 2 foot wide strips of foam insulation. He says he can see the lines between the foam blocks.

I would glue it onto a sheet of mdf.

[Joust]

Chris N, had similar problems. He glued his to 2 foot wide strips of foam insulation. He says he can see the lines between the foam blocks.

I would glue it onto a sheet of mdf.

[lyd]

[drice1234]

Sorry to hear that. I did the Wilsonart screen and built basically the same frame you did with no issues, took 2 hours. I must have gotten the thicker laminate.

[nuttall_chris]

Like Joust said, I tried to keep it light by using styrofoam insulation board as the backer material. I used two layers of 1/2 inch material with overlaps at each joint.

The finished product is....not great and I do have the thicker laminate. I can see where the joints are and I also have a few "bubbles" where I was not able to press out all of the air. I glued it all together so I think correcting my errors is going to be difficult.

I'm considering heaving it in the garbage and getting one of these
http://www.eastporters.com/estore/cart.php?target=product&product_id=90&category_id=30

One of the other local guys is using this exact screen with the same projector that I have and it looks amazing. Very bright and even with the 2.4 gain it has much less hotspotting than the wilsonart.

Chris.

[Joust]

Chris,
DO IT!
i'll take your willsonart.

[Joust]

Chris,
DO IT!
i'll take your willsonart.

[nuttall_chris]

[garyfritz]

lyd, sorry to hear of your problems. Wouldn't the thicker material be even harder to get flat? I would think it would have more memory than the thin material.

I'm planning to get the thin material and glue it to a 2" foam backing. My screen is only 48x87 so I can do it on one 4x8 sheet of foam. Others have done that with good results -- crossing my fingers.

The Elunevision screen sounds nice but at 2-3x more $$, it's out of my price range...

[nuttall_chris]

[garyfritz]

White glue? Hm. I thought you'd have to use some kind of quick-set spray-on glue. White glue would be a lot easier since it would give you time to position it, roll out the bubbles, etc. Do you have to lay a sheet of plywood on top of it so it dries properly?

[nuttall_chris]

[ecrabb]

Guys, the roller to apply laminate is called a "J-roller":


It's designed to apply very high pressure to a very small area - specifically to bond contact cement - which is what adheres laminate to the substrate (in most cases MDF). The way you do typically do laminate countertops is apply contact cement to both the substrate and the backside of the laminate, and let it dry to a tack 10-15 minutes. You put furring strips or spacers on the substrate, then you carefully flip the laminate and lay it on the substrate. The strips keep the two pieces from coming in contact and allow you to position or re-position the laminate on the substrate. Once you're satisfied with the position, you slide the strips out and let the pieces touch. Once the two pieces touch each other, it ain't coming back apart. Then, you use the J-roller, rolling from the center to the outsides to push any air bubbles out. Once you're done, the laminate isn't going anywhere... ever. It's perfectly flat and smooth. The only worry is that you get sawdust or other large particles sandwiched between the two.

That's basically how I built my screen. I built a 2x4 frame, screwed two 96x27 pieces onto that frame, then screwed a 2x4 long-edge down onto the seam between the two sheets. No biscuits, glue, or other fasteners. I didn't even fill any of the screw holes in the MDF - I just countersunk the screw heads so they were flush with the surface of the MDF. I had NO waves, seams, ripples, bubbles or other imperfections whatsoever. I used 2x4's and 3/4" MDF along with the heavier laminate. The screen ended up being horribly heavy. If I were to do it again, I'd use 1/2" MDF and 1x material instead of 2x material.

Total cost was well under $150. $100 or so for laminate, $15 for contact adhesive, $10 or so for some studs, and a box of course-thread drywall screws. I attached it to the wall with a 2x4 that I ripped into a French cleat on a friend's table saw. Total assembly time was probably a couple of hours once I had all the materials.

The 2x4 design turned out kind of cool. The screen is spaced out 3.5" from the wall. I put an outlet directly behind the screen and added rope light around the screen, so I have a cool halo around the screen. It's on only before and after movies.

Here's the screen in SketchUp:

[ecrabb]

Guys, the roller to apply laminate is called a "J-roller":


It's designed to apply very high pressure to a very small area - specifically to bond contact cement - which is what adheres laminate to the substrate (in most cases MDF). The way you do typically do laminate countertops is apply contact cement to both the substrate and the backside of the laminate, and let it dry to a tack 10-15 minutes. You put furring strips or spacers on the substrate, then you carefully flip the laminate and lay it on the substrate. The strips keep the two pieces from coming in contact and allow you to position or re-position the laminate on the substrate. Once you're satisfied with the position, you slide the strips out and let the pieces touch. Once the two pieces touch each other, it ain't coming back apart. Then, you use the J-roller, rolling from the center to the outsides to push any air bubbles out. Once you're done, the laminate isn't going anywhere... ever. It's perfectly flat and smooth. The only worry is that you get sawdust or other large particles sandwiched between the two.

That's basically how I built my screen. I built a 2x4 frame, screwed two 96x27 pieces onto that frame, then screwed a 2x4 long-edge down onto the seam between the two sheets. No biscuits, glue, or other fasteners. I didn't even fill any of the screw holes in the MDF - I just countersunk the screw heads so they were flush with the surface of the MDF. I had NO waves, seams, ripples, bubbles or other imperfections whatsoever. I used 2x4's and 3/4" MDF along with the heavier laminate. The screen ended up being horribly heavy. If I were to do it again, I'd use 1/2" MDF and 1x material instead of 2x material.

Total cost was well under $150. $100 or so for laminate, $15 for contact adhesive, $10 or so for some studs, and a box of course-thread drywall screws. I attached it to the wall with a 2x4 that I ripped into a French cleat on a friend's table saw. Total assembly time was probably a couple of hours once I had all the materials.

The 2x4 design turned out kind of cool. The screen is spaced out 3.5" from the wall. I put an outlet directly behind the screen and added rope light around the screen, so I have a cool halo around the screen. It's on only before and after movies.

Here's the screen in SketchUp:

[GEBrown]

[ecrabb]

[ecrabb]

[AnalogRocks]

Anyone know the thickness('s) to get and ther one(s) to avoid? It's starting to snow soon and I need to build a screen.

[AnalogRocks]

Anyone know the thickness('s) to get and ther one(s) to avoid? It's starting to snow soon and I need to build a screen.

[lyd]

[scottap]

Would something like 1/8" hardboard be stiff enough keep it flat or do you really need to do MDF? I currently have my Wilson Art screwed directly into the wall and that's not keeping it flat enough. I'm trying to keep it as light weight as possible and was hoping that hard board backing would do the trick.

[Joust]

If you could find some large enough, sure. MDF is the only thing that I know of that will come in a sheet 5x8
most sheet material is 4x8 max.

The other thing I was thinking was that with this willsonart, you have the opportunity to make a curved screen.

[Joust]

If you could find some large enough, sure. MDF is the only thing that I know of that will come in a sheet 5x8
most sheet material is 4x8 max.

The other thing I was thinking was that with this willsonart, you have the opportunity to make a curved screen.

[scottap]

My screen is already curved and I didn't even have to try.

[lyd]

Well, I am going to say no, 1/8" hardboard is not sufficient, damn it.

I totally over-engineered this thing and then worked my ass off all weekend, and I can see that it is not going to be totally "sheet of MDF" flat. And it is not even done yet. *sigh*

It is not going to be anywhere near as bad as it is now, but whether it will be acceptable I can not say. I can only finish it and see.

I took pics as I went, and you can view the story of the debacle so far in a quick-and-dirty set of pages I put together here.

lyd