Scratch Off Travel Map: How to Display

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I recently purchased a scratch-off travel map from Amazon. My goal is to try to go to all 50 states (as an adult! Nothing before the age of 21 is going to count for me) by the time I’m 50. This map is a great way to track everywhere I have gone!

The problem was the map was shipped being rolled up. I tried weighing the corners down, but no matter what I did, the map kept rolling back up! I decided to try to make a wooden backing that I could nail the map’s edges into so the map would stay open.

We have so much scrap wood in our workshop, so I assumed I could find the pieces I’d need to make the backing. The map was an odd shape (17″ x 27″), so finding enough pieces that were long and/or enough was a challenge. But… I figured out how to make it work!

We had a bunch of rectangular pieces that were 8.5″ x 11″ each.

I put together 4 of them. The length was perfect, but the width still wasn’t quite long enough.

I cut some spare pieces to fill in the extra inches for the width. It doesn’t look very pretty, but it finally fit the map!

Using wood glue, I glued the sides of the pieces together. I clamped them until everything was completely dry. It was a process to clamp everything together, as I didn’t have clamps long enough to do everything at once.

I took two small pieces of wood (that were maybe 1/4″ thick) and put them over the connection points of the wood… just to give it all some extra support.