So, now that the studio is starting to shape up, I need a place to store all those glass rods. Keeping them in the cardboard boxes isn't going to work so well when its time to actually find what I want to use!Inspired by others online, I chose to use fence rail. I called around to several fencing places in the area, but no one had what I was looking for until one guy finally said "oh, you want vinyl 3-rail horse fence. Of course we have that!" Not only that, but he had scrap chunks of it that he was willing to sell for about half price.
After a couple trips to see him, we finally had enough fence rail. We got a masonry cut-off blade (local Home Depot was out of all other kinds of cut-off blades) and put it in the table saw (I would recommend using a chop saw, but someone thought it would be easier to change the blade in the table saw so we used that, which worked fine but was more work in the end). It cut the material really well but made a horrible mess with lots of "sawdust" that is actually vinyl and static-y so it sticks to everything, including people! All the pieces then had to get hosed off and dried.
Shane had a cabinet in the garage he was looking to get rid of. The previous owners left it with the house. Its on nice casters and seemed a good size. Amazingly, the fence rail pieces fit PERFECTLY inside the cabinet with no need for shims or other filler, and the whole cabinet is just the right height to sit under the window sill in the studio. Judy put on a quick coat of white paint (it was looking really yucky before that!) We used some boards left over from a destruction project in our master bedroom to make stops at the back of the fence rail so the glass doesn't slide too far in and get lost. The bottom two rows of fencing are cut longer and have a deeper stop so they can hold boro rods (which are longer than soft glass).
All the glass now has a home. Each color has its own slot. Unfortunately, all the slots are now full and I may have recently purchased a few more colors...
