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Lighted Display Cases


bgreenstone

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Earlier this year when my wife and I returned from Tucson with an SUV loaded to the brim with fossils and rocks, and we quickly realized that we had no way to properly display them. We searched and searched for "nice" display cases, but all we could find was plastic snarge. Restoration Hardware was the only place that sold nice specimen display cases, but they were too big, and too expensive. I told my wife "I could make those, and I'd put lights in them!", so I did. We spent the last few months coming up with a good design and making prototypes. Now we've got an entire house full of these things.

-Brian

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terrific job, thanks for sharing them! :)

"Your serpent of Egypt is bred now of your mud by the operation of your sun; so is your crocodile." Lepidus

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Those are really nice, great work! : )

Every once in a great while it's not just a big rock down there!

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:wub:

"Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence"_ Carl Sagen

No trees were killed in this posting......however, many innocent electrons were diverted from where they originally intended to go.

" I think, therefore I collect fossils." _ Me

"When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth."__S. Holmes

"can't we all just get along?" Jack Nicholson from Mars Attacks

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Hey Brian, You do some very nice work. Can I ask what you used to keep the glass together?

RB

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  • 3 weeks later...

Hey Brian, You do some very nice work. Can I ask what you used to keep the glass together?

RB

It's all leaded glass. It's built with the same techniques you'd use for stained glass. We copper foil the glass panes, and then solder them together. Then we apply either a copper or black patina to the soldered seams, and finally we apply carnauba wax to protect it from oxidization.

-Brian

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Thanks Brian. I have a Didymoceras that will need one of those once I put it together and figure out the deminsions needed.

RB

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  • 3 weeks later...

Very nice displays, i may well have a go at making one of the boxes to display a set of ammonites.

I love this forum, it seams to produce ideas that you would not think of yourself and inspires members to achieve results that without the information on the forum may not normally be achieved either through lack of understanding or no clear explanation anywhere else.

Thanks for the post

Regards

Mike

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  • 4 weeks later...

Very cool! This case displays items very well. How much does it cost to make one of these? Might need to look into making a few after seeing yours!

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  • 3 months later...

Here's another custom case I just completed:

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I'm really happy with this one, but I've got to find a different wall to put it against since the fossil sorta matches the wall color.

-Brian

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From one crafty DIYer to another, I love these. They're very nice. I never thought about soldering the glass together.

~Charlie~

"There are those that look at things the way they are, and ask why.....i dream of things that never were, and ask why not?" ~RFK
->Get your Mosasaur print
->How to spot a fake Trilobite
->How to identify a CONCRETION from a DINOSAUR EGG

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Very nice... And inspirational. My one thought is what if you put the lights along the top, horizontally so they don't reflect on the back glass pane?

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Very nice... And inspirational. My one thought is what if you put the lights along the top, horizontally so they don't reflect on the back glass pane?

When I was first contemplating building these my thought was to put a light across the top, however, there were several problems:

1. One light bar across the top isn't enough light.

2. The light would be uneven - very bright on the top of the specimen, but dim on the bottom and sides.

3. Mounting it would be hard since the lights are attached to the base, not the glass top, so some sort of arch would have to support the horizontal light.

The glare isn't as bad as it often looks in photos. In real life the reflections actually adds some dimension to it. My first prototype I tried to put a black backing on the rear glass, and the blocked the reflections, but I found it actually looked better with them. I've also thought about using Museum Glass either for the entire thing, or maybe just for the rear pane to block reflections, but Museum glass is crazy-expensive and I'm not sure how it would hold up to the soldering and flux and patina cleaning.

Thanks,

-Brian

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