Please recommend a genuinely repositionable (NON-permanent) adhesive

I have been on the hunt for literally years.

My goal: A “reverse” post-it board - the board is sticky, not the paper, so you can stick anything on it. So I need something that will give good coverage over a large surface, since I want to spread it all over the board. This likely means a spray or liquid, but I want to hear about anything that works.

What I do NOT want:

Post-it brand “pre-made” post-it boards: way too expensive and not the size I want. And I mean WAY too expensive.

Temporarily repositionable: I have tried quite a number of products that laid claim to being repositionable. They weren’t. They just took a longer time to become permanent: you could reposition for maybe an hour or two, possibly several hours. But within 24 hours or 48 at the outside… dry and non-sticky.

I did in fact find EXACTLY the product that did EXACTLY what I wanted: Wackytac Liquid Sticky Note Adhesive by EK Success, it had exactly the right amount of “tack” (stickiness… I’ve learned a lot about the terminology over the years, since I started my quest with double-sided tape, which, in order to work as I would like, needs to be pretty high-tack on one side and very low-tack on the other, which is almost impossible to find.) and it stays “tacky” for months, even years I guess, since I still have things that I originally made with it at least two years ago that are actually still somewhat tacky. This product was really ideal, because the price was very reasonable and the product covered a lot of territory.

It also gets kinda messy because it does work, so over time various bits and pieces of hair and fluff and dust accumulate on it. The best way to clean it is to use masking tape, but then it needs to be freshened up. So in addition to making new ones for new reasons all the time, I also need to have a supply to keep older ones fresh.

But of course, as I could have predicted, about five minutes after I discovered it, it stopped being manufactured. And I dont’ understand why, since it was exactly right. I keep looking and hoping that it will magically reappear, but every link to it is dead or old or says “out of stock”.

E-how gives a recipe to make your own that is worthless.
I’ve tried 3-M Scotch respositionable spray - nope.
Elmer’s mounting spray. Nope.
ELmers sticks, nope.

I’ve tried a bunch of lesser things, most of which are very expensive because they come in tiny containers and don’t go very far.

Most recently I’m looking at Slice in a tube and wondering if anyone can tell me if it is REALLY repositionable?

And if by chance anyone has a source for old stock of the Wackytac liquid…please let me know!

Have you tried any of the quilt basting sprays? Several people I know swear by this for their scrap booking pages.

Full disclosure, I don’t do quilts or scrap booking so have no personal experience to go by.

Funny you should mention that, HBns…just after I wrote this I did some more hunting and was led to the idea of basting spray for the first time, which led me to a particular brand and a company and then a different product by that same company which is, as they describe it: “Permanently Repositionable Craft Adhesive” and that is precisely what I seek! I had an email exchange that confirmed that this is the ticket and I look forward to giving it a try.

Their customeer service was amazing, so if anyone needs any spray adhesives, I recommend that you look at this company’s products.

The adhesives range from very temporary to very permanent.

3M once gave away a lot of stuff for the asking. It has been almost 20 years since I last contacted them and I don’t recall whom I contacted. I remember getting a sample of tape to seal the seams in fiberglass greenhouse. A sample of some adhesive to stick sheets of fiberglass together, came in a spray can that later was marketed briefly etc. They also had a catalog of stuff one could purchase directly. I bought a lot of fly fishing things for my late FIL.

Sorry I just cannot remember whom I talked to. I’m sure it was some office in St. Paul. Best I can find online is Contact 3M in the United States

Good luck. I assume that a steel board with magnets to hold things to it wouldn’t work for you?
You can get some very strong but small and inobtrusive magnets these days. In some ways even better than a sticky board, because you can put papers on top of each other (though one more step to put them on and off the board). And, if you’re so inclined, most larger dry-erase boards have metal backing, so you can magnetically hang papers from the board and write temporary notes on it.

What’s the sticky stuff they make photo albums out of? I mean, I know you cover it with plastic so it doesn’t have the debris issue so much, but my mom has some photo albums that are multiple decades old. They’re still quite sticky when you pull the plastic back today.

You assume correctly.