How to make a pinboard for a map of the world.
I wanted to make a simple fun present for my wife Lucy earlier this year and thought about making a map pin board for her. It is surprisingly difficult to find the right materials, so I thought I'd write this up for Google's benefit.
I had chosen a good map of the world for us to plot our travels on, National Geographic have a wide range of colours and styles. If you are in London, then Stanfords is the best place to go, but most large book stores should have a choice of maps, amazon cannot help you.
To make the actual pinboard, I had initially thought of using layers of cork floor tiles glued onto hardboard. This would probably work and the materials are fairly widely available, but the resulting board would have been very heavy.
So I went along to my local wood yard to ask what they suggested and they had a piece of sundeala, which is the same material that pinboards are made of in schools, it is soft compressed wood pulp I think, but perfect for the job. It is fragile though, so we made a frame from some decorative edging using a mitre block. We used wood glue to attach the frame to the sundeala, as nails might have come through the frame.
Fun project, which took less than an hour to complete and we can plot where we have been and where we want to go in the world. We are a bit euro-centric with outposts in north and south america, but we have plans to visit the rest of the world too.
