Battens can be carved/sanded to alter behavior; competitive sailors “tune” their sails. You could use a small drill bit to make small holes in the batten and sew them to the banner.
Call up a local fence company and ask if you can buy a few privacy slats for chain link fences. Picture here. They should have black ones in stock, and if you only need a half dozen or so you can probably grab them for cheap.
I’d drill and rivet if it were me, dab some black paint on the rivet heads and call it good.
Found a cost- and time-effective solution in some small plant stakes - rough nubbed plastic outside, metal core for weight and strength. Cut the point off and painted them blue. Will attach them with 5-6 wire ties, which should hold them well against the thick vinyl fabric and the sharpish nubs will keep them in place.
Had a funny thing happen at Home Depot. I wanted really good wire ties, the kind that won’t loosen no matter how much they’re yanked and jiggled. (Seems like all the ones I’ve bought in recent years, even brand names, hold about as well as a half-hitch in string.) So there on a peg is a bag of 100 6-inchers, the kind with a reinforcing metal claw in the head, assuring me they’ll hold forever. I’ve used them; they do.
No price. No second bag anywhere. No actual peg that seems to be theirs. Well, wasn’t going to pay $9 for the plastic-only ones, so I walked up to the CS counter and handed the bag to the older, grizzled guy. “Stranger on your shelf - no tag. Price?” He runs it, grunts, runs it again, checks something. Tosses me the bag. “Not ours. Take 'em.”
I can’t figure out how a “foreign” product got on HD’s shelf, but I was happy to get the $10-12 discount on this stupid repair job. Never had anything like that happen.
AH-HA! Gardening stakes. I win! Something…
I hope those nylon ties are black. As an experienced amateur radio operator it’s pretty much lore that only the valance ones are UV resistant.
As they used to say on the Japanese version of Iron Chef “The people’s respect and admiration forever”
Thank you, Gary!!
WAG, someone brought them in so they could get another bag of the same ones, set them down and forgot about them. Or they don’t stock them, they (or a supplier/repairer) use them and left them on the shelf.
I’ve been having a hard time finding good BIG zip ties. The kind that are like 4 or 5 feet long. I usually keep a bag on hand. The last bag I had was great, but now the ones I get snap as soon as they bend a little. Now I have to resort to, like, fixing things instead of holding them together with zip ties.
We have some blowers almost identical to these in our cooler. The drain pans were falling on both of them (the screw holes had rusted out. I finally, used a giant zip tie all the way around it and it held up for several years. Next set of zip ties, didn’t make it a day. Tried several, sometimes I was lucky to even get it on without them snapping. Like I said, finally just fixed the stupid thing the right way. Set new holes and filled the old ones. Small project, but those big zip ties worked so well.
Damn autocorrect! How attempting to type “black” becomes “valance” is beyond me.
Appreciation. I might have wandered over and found those, but I went looking specifically because of the suggestion. I was thinking too flimsy, too big, too expensive, but the small ones were almost perfect for a dab-o-glue and zip-tie fix.
A flat bar of some kind that would have taken bolts would have been better, but it got into the too-spensive, too-much-hassle category. So my blue sticks and I are off to fix the problem today.
Yep, black. They only have to survive mild summer conditions for about three months, and if they start to pop after that, the flags will still be in good condition with the sticks and ties removed.
Oh: so I was putting my jammies on last night when I looked down and saw, to my horror, that my right foot was cyanotic. Dr. B.'s health tip of the day: don’t spray paint things blue while barefoot. (It was a perfect misting - would have worked in any zombie or deader movie.)
Blue paint is better than 3M 77 spray adhesive on your arms! Been there done that one.
Ghad, yes. I hate getting spray mount on my arms… and 77 is much worse. Both seem to have hunter-seeker nanites in them and you can’t do a quick job without getting the mist on you. I need to build a spray booth one of these days…
I didn’t want to spray in the garage because of overstay and quickly discovered that if you spray with your back to the breeze the eddys are not your friend.