Building the board and placing 240 nails

This is the step where mistakes are permanent. A crooked ring of nails cannot be fixed later, and a template printed at 97% puts every single nail in the wrong place.

1. Paint first

Cut the board about 5 cm larger than the nail ring, sand the face, and give it two or three thin coats of white. Thin coats, fully dry between them — 12 hours is a realistic gap. Thick coats stay soft and swallow nails.

Matte, not gloss. Gloss reflects light straight back at the viewer and kills the contrast the piece depends on.

2. Print at 100%

In the print dialog choose Actual size and turn off anything called “fit to page”, “scale to fit” or “shrink oversized pages”. Then measure.

The cover page of every template from this site carries a 10 cm bar and a 4 inch bar. Put a ruler on one of them. If it reads 9.7 cm your printer scaled the file, and no amount of careful cutting will save the result.

Heavier paper helps — 24 to 32 lb (90 to 120 gsm) resists tearing while you nail through it.

3. Join the tiles

Home printers cannot print the outer 3 to 5 mm of a sheet, which is why big templates are tiled.

• Cut along the dashed border of every tile. That border is the true edge of the design.
• Butt the tiles edge to edge with no overlap and tape them from behind, so the front stays flat.
• The cover page shows a numbered map of which tile goes where. Every tile also repeats that map with its own square highlighted, so you can never lose track.

Assemble the whole sheet on a table before it goes anywhere near the board.

4. Tape it down and mark the centre

Centre the assembled sheet on the painted board — the crosshair at the middle of the design helps — and tape it at four points. Nail through those four points first: it pins the paper and gives you a reference if anything shifts.

5. Nail to a consistent depth

Drive one nail through every black dot. Larger dots mark every tenth nail; they exist so you can count without counting.

Consistency of height matters more than the exact height. Somewhere between 5 mm and 12 mm of protrusion all work; a ring where some nails stand 6 mm proud and others 11 mm does not, because the thread rides up the tall ones and slips off. Use a depth gauge: a strip of tape around the nail, or a block of the right thickness held beside it.

Check your spacing against the printed dots every 20 to 30 nails. It is very easy to drift by half a gap and only notice at nail 200.

If the board is hard enough to split, drill pilot holes with a pin vice.

6. Tear the paper away

Do not try to pull the sheet off in one piece. Make radial cuts between the nails with a craft knife, then pull the paper out in wedges. Tweezers get the last scraps out from around the nail shanks.

Some paper dust always survives. A soft brush and a lot of patience.

7. Check the ring

Before you tie on a single thread, look across the board at eye level. The nails should form an even ring at an even height. Tap down anything that stands proud. This is the last easy moment.

A note on numbering

Everything on this site uses one convention, and it is the one printed on the templates:

Nail 1 is at the top centre. Numbers run clockwise. Every tenth nail is bold.

Other tools and other tutorials use other conventions — some start at zero, some run anticlockwise. If you mix a template from one source with a sequence from another, the result is a mirror image at best. Keep them from the same place.

Sources

Template transfer and nailing practice from stringartgenerator.cc’s woodworking notes, Johannes Haupt, WowStrings, and stringartgenerator.co.