Cheap Plaque / Memorial Tablet

I figured out how to make nice plaques / memorial tablets for cheap using easily available materials. To fool someone, to honor someone or for use as a medium of protest (I put it on a barbecue grill and wrote that it was "Dedicated to 60'000'000 animals slaughtered in Switzerland per year")

Materials:

- soda can

- abrasive paper (sand paper)

- permanent marker

- strong concrete tape or some double sided tape to mount it

- scissors, some cloth to clean

Optional: inkjet, transfer medium (like backside of a plastic overhead projector sheet)

Step 1: Cutting Apart Soda Cans

carefully cut it open at the top and the botton and one cut down the lenght.

Step 2: Cleaning the Can

you should get this. clean it a bit using the towel

Step 3: Flattening and Cutting Smaller Parts

You have to flatten it already a bit so you can easily cut it into smaller pieces just as big as you need them. I flattened it by rubbing it over the hard edge of my table

Step 4: Sanding

sand it with abrasive paper. it removes the coating helping the permanent marker to cling onto it

Step 5: Writing

Now you can either write directly onto it by using your freehand writing skills and jump to step10 OR you can click next and follow my trick to transfer print a draft onto the plaque which you can afterwards trace with the pen to get a more crisp font. I recommend pens like edding which are weatherproof.

Surely you could also use stencils or something like that but I was to lazy to cut a stencil thus I used the following inkjet transfer technique

Step 6: Correct Plastic Sheets / Transfer Paper

there are also transfer techniques if you have a laser printer but due to lack of experience I can only cover inkjet here. Get a plastic sheet like the one on the picture. One side is printable. We need the other side which repells the ink. One sheet can be used over and over

Step 7: Write Mirrored Text for Transfer

write your text in wordpad, editor, paint or similar then copy + paste it into paint and mirror it. Print it onto the sheet

Step 8: Rubbing the Ink Onto the Surface

some cans accept paint better than others, maybe you have to sand it more. It does not have to be that beautiful now. It should just be a sketch to give you a bit of a guidline to trace

Step 9: Tracing

trace the lines

Step 10: Mounting the Plaque

mount it using a double sided tape or a one sided tape which you glued to the back of the plaque. I recommend concrete tape which is pretty strong. More expensive but those are big rolls that go a long way.

Step 11: Ad a Tranport "seal" to Protect the Tape's Glue Surface

If you have to transport the prepared plaque to another place, you can cover the glue-side of the tape with some coated paper like baking paper or the backside of used stickers.