Huh. I guess I never did elaborate on how I've been using magnets, did I? Well, here's an attempt to explain it: (sorry some of the photos aren't great quality)
I created custom cutting templates in Silhouette Studio to cut out posts with this extra section at the bottom. It has a flat area for a magnet (or two) to be glued onto it with superglue and then flaps to allow it to be glued up into the post so it creates a flat bottom to the post.
To get them to attach to the tiles, I use some material called "FlexIron" or "RubberSteel." It's a rubber material that has tiny iron bits embedded in it and has an adhesive backing. It's basically the same thing that refrigerator magnets are made out of, except they're not actually magnetic. It's the same material that AleaTools calls their "conversion material" that you stick to the bottom of minis to get their magnetic markers to attach. I found a company that sold me a 2' x 10' roll of it for $35. Using this allows me to put my posts anywhere on the tile and have them stick pretty well.
I modified the cutting template for TLX tiles in Silhouette Studio, and I print that out on adhesive paper and slap that right onto the FlexIron. I then cut those out roughly, peel off the adhesive backing from the FlexIron, and place those right onto my sheet of foamcore.
Then, I cut out along the actual lines of the tile template, cutting all the way through the FlexIron and the foamcore. I also cut out the little notches on the sides where I'll be putting magnets. Notice that I've put labels onto the template to indicate which pole of the magnets should be facing out. One interesting side effect of this is that it adds to the thickness of the interior of the tile so it gets MUCH closer to that 1/4" thickness that TLX tiles are made for.
I then glue my tile wrapper (I've modified the wrappers and the cutting template for my robocutter to remove the lines for the slots the Linx Tabs will go into) onto the top of the tile with the FlexIron on top. After that, I add in my magnets and glue the flaps around, one side at a time. Sorry this pic is so bad. I was redoing one that I glued poorly. I learned to use another straight edge pressed up against the edge of the tile to get a good square shape to the wrapper.
To make sure that I can put tile to tile together and not have issues with the polarity of the magnets, I made sure to use an alternating arrangement around the edges of the tiles so any tile can connect with any other. It might require that 3x6 and 3x3 tiles be rotated different than I'd like, however. And it also limits me a little on the arrangement of tiles to each other. I cannot, for example, put two 6x6 tiles together so they're offset by 3 inches. Because that handy notation of N and S poles that I printed on the cutting template is now glued under the wrapper, I make sure to have a printout of that arrangement nearby, but flipped, because I'm looking at the back side of the tiles.
The black rectangles represents the N pole, while the red ones represent the S pole. To maintain consistency, I picked up one of these magnets that color codes its poles:
Now, for the most part, this has worked fairly well, but it isn't perfect. The biggest weakness is the magnets on the sides of the tiles. They seem pretty strong, but still tend to do this:
I've tried even stronger magnets, but those tend to pull on the paper so hard when I'm separating the tiles that it looks like they're going to tear through the paper. Plus, stronger magnets means even more cost. When you have 4 or more in a square arrangement, they hold pretty darn well, (as can be seen from the pics on my first post of the stuff sitting on a scale) but it still doesn't have the same level of rigidity that Linx tabs do.
The other downside ends up being the cost of the magnets. The ones I'm using cost a base of $.45 each. Less if I buy in large quantities, but I have to buy in HUGE quantities to get them for less than $.40 each. If these are tiles that I'm going to use a lot, then it's probably not as big of a deal, but if it's something that'll only see use once or twice, then it's tough to justify that cost.
To that end, I've played around with the idea of not gluing the tile wrappers directly to the foamcore and finding a way to reuse the foamcore and magnets. I picked up some cheap refrigerator magnet type of material and tried using that in combination with the FlexIron on the foamcore and the wrappers. Some of it worked okay. Some of it just added too much thickness for the wrapper to actually fit around. The most promising thus far has been to put the refrigerator magnet stuff on the flaps of the wrapper that normally get glued to the bottom of the tile and identical stuff to the bottom of the tile:
This actually seems to get the interior of the wrapper right up to 1/4" thick, which works well with the TLX format. The added cost of putting those on isn't all that much. And I'm not using much of that magnet material. Silhouette even makes 8.5 x 11" sheets of the stuff that you can run through their cutters to robocut using a template. Those sheets tend to cost more, but it would make it easier to cut them out and not waste material. The odd thing is that it seems to matter which direction you cut them out of the sheet/roll. Like, they made the magnetic field work differently across the short side of the page versus the long side. So, you definitely want to lay them out consistently on the sheet or roll. I still have to figure out how to best glue the magnets to the edges of the foamcore. Superglue doesn't seem to be a good idea 'cuz it melts the foam.
I'm still not convinced that this is the best route to go, though. I've even started playing around with just using toothpicks to connect tiles together.
|
