The actual board is a pretty trivial exercise. There are of course many ways to construct it. But I want to keep in mind reproducibility and either robustness or ease of replacement.
To begin I am just using stuff laying around the shop.
To begin I grabbed a section pegboard, some pink foam and some roof flashing.
Looking at a variety of boards it quickly becomes clear that constructing everything in 5's is the way to go. So I took the foam (We had 2") and cut a bunch of 1" wide strips. I then took those strips and cut a 1/4" groove down the center 1" deep,
Beginning to construct a board the first thing I ran into was the springiness of the rails. Once the wire is inserted enough clamping has to take place to hold the the wire and whatever is attached to it in place. This is important for any wall mounted boards. The steel flashing iI was using was way to stiff. But we had some light Aluminium flashing laying around and that seemed to actually work.
So thinking about it I figured to bend the rails around a dowel and then flatten out the center forcing the half circles to pinch together. Wrong ...
While I got that to work eventually, it is way to much work (considering the number of rails that need to be produced. While I could build some jigs to speed up the process I'm not all that sure how reproducible I can make them. But then thinking just a bit more, is there any need for a single piece rail? wouldn't it work just as well to have an open center with a rail running down both sides? It certainly seems to.
Before I really get into manufacturing and jigging up I decided to go reall small. a half dozen 5 sections. Cutting a some 1 1/4" strips from the metal I then cut in some scrap wood I cut 3/4" and 1/4" deep grooves. Puttin the metal strip in the 3/4" groove and bending 90 then using the 1/4 " groove to bend back the the top and bottom I had one side of the rail. When both sides are insterted in to the rail they act as the clamp . This seems works very well and the open bottom allows the foam to preform some additional grip.
