Idea 10: Plexi box Pipe Collection

Just before Christmas, a client came in with a bag full of pipes that had belonged to his late father-in-law, which had great sentimental value for his wife. He wanted them framed in a shadowbox presentation or some way that would let him display them on a wall in their home.

Because a traditional shadowbox only allows you to view objects from the front, we thought it would look better in a plexi-box, where you could view the pipes from different angles. We had one built with rounded edges and a 1" deep strainer back that we covered in a Crescent Moorman Library Leather. Each pipe was initially held in place with a small lump of UHU Tac, an adhesive putty that doesn't harm the object. The pipes were all secured with a variety of methods, using nylon fishing line to lash them down, along with acrylic "Mighty Mounts" to secure the stems and pipe bowls.

The plexi box gets held in place by means of countersunk screws on the perimeter of the base, and the whole finished box is hung on the wall by menas of an aluminum "Z-Bar" french cleat, shown in one of the photos.

In designing the layout of the pipes, we consulted with the client first, who told us his preference for what should go where, and then we fine tuned it to create a layout that addressed all his issues. While very time consuming to finish, the end result was very satisfying. Nearly any collection can be artfully framed if you put some thought into the design!

Framing design and execution: Brian Flax