I moved in to a new place this past summer and brought my moderately priced projector and cheap ($100) 100″ screen along with me. The problem is in the apartment’s layout there’s just no place to set up the screen that’s watchable. What we do have is a set of French doors between the living room and bedroom to work with. Rear projection screens (and even the material) is expensive and what’s worse I couldn’t find anything that would work well in the space — most were too big, all were to expensive for my current tastes/setup. A little bit of brainstorming, internet searching, and back of the napkin schematics later I had a plan.

I was going to build a simple frame and use wax paper as the screen material. The idea of using wax paper came from seeing a window display that utilized sheets of it (or something very similar) glued/tacked to the glass as a projection material. I didn’t have a 78″ diagonal piece of glass laying around and even if I had it would have been seriously heavy. Not that big a deal if it was going to be permanently mounted, but a bit of a problem if the plan was to only put it up when being used (since it would be in the middle of our apartment.) I figured that stretched tight enough the wax paper alone would do a decent job and tests of small pieces with the projector proved that out. The only kink in the plan was that one sheet wasn’t enough. It was letting too much light through and the image lacked saturation. Two sheets did the trick and looked great.

The next problem was dealing with the seams. The solution was to weave the two layers of wax paper. The woven sheets tightened things up a bit and the friction kept them in place so that once I lined up the edges of adjacent sheets they did a really good job of staying put. I wouldn’t say it’s perfect as you can see in the picture with the room lights on, but once their out and you’re watching the movie you hardly, if ever, notice them. By all means if you look for them you can see them, but as soon as you quit paying attention they all but disappear.

Parts List:

• (3) 2″x2″x8′ pieces of wood – $15
• (4) right angle metal brackets – $4
• (1-2) rolls of white/bleached wax paper $4

If you have the wood working equipment to do properly joined corners you can probably skip out on the angle brackets (I don’t atm.) The wax paper was a little difficult to come by, not really sure why. I had to search around at several grocery stores to find one (Safeway at Church and Market) that did. The stuff exists for sale on the internet in heavier weights and in larger width rolls and if you can come up with the stuff at a good price you may end up with a slightly better screen, but as the pictures show the standard kitchen stuff works.

I won’t go through step-by-step detailed build instructions mainly b/c I didn’t take pictures to go along with them, but an overview follows. I started by cutting the boards with 45 degree ends to length. For my target of 78″ diagonal with a 16:9 ratio that worked out to roughly 68″x40″. The exact measurements aren’t critical, but the two long pieces and the two short pieces have to be exactly the same size as their counterparts. Once you’ve cut them to size you’ll need to drill pilot holes and screw the corners together, 2″x2″ stock will split easily so make sure you pre-drill the full depth with a bit as close to the size of your screw as you can, while still letting it get a grip.

Next, you’ll need a large flat clean surface for the weaving portion: tile, wood, concrete, etc. start by cutting all of the pieces for one direction to length. I started cutting the pieces that would run from top-to-bottom. I then lined them up loosely and then used painters/masking tape to tack them in to place on one side. Once that was done I wove the side-to-side pieces in to place and cut them to length. I then tacked them in to place on one end and started to tighten up all of the seams and alignments. At this point it should be clear that the reason I used masking tape was so that things could be adjusted without fighting a stickier tape and tearing the wax paper every time an adjustment was needed. Once I was pretty happy with the alignment of things I began working my way across the bottom tacking the loose ends of the wax paper strips in place and then continued up the final loose side until all of the wax paper was tacked in to place. After a few minor tweaks and adjustments I went around the perimeter of the frame using packing tape (much stronger, stickier, and longer lasting) to do a more permanent job.

A couple of hooks in the frame and a couple on the top of the door jam and we’re in business.

A full photo set with larger images can be found here