A stand for microscope slides and cover slips

Here's a quick practical idea.

I wash and dry my microscope slides for re-use, and I needed somewhere to dry the slides. I planned to sit them in saw-cuts in a piece of "2x1" (that's "41x19 DAR" to purists), but the saw I was using did not make wide enough cuts for the slides to fit.

So I used panel pins to hold the slides, and the saw cuts hold the cover slips. The pictures tell the story.

In this shot, that's the washing dish at the back. I blot them on the paper towel then leave them in the rack.

Here is the timber on my work bench, with the saw cuts made.

Just for a neater job, I marked up the alignments for the pins and drilled starter holes.

Then I tapped in the pins.










And finished the job.  That meant cutting off the length that was to be the stand: I usually work with a large piece and trim it when I am ready.

Here it is in use, but because I use circular cover slips, I quickly discovered that when I moved my stand, the cover slips rolled out.

Cover slips are thin, very thin—and they crunch under foot.  This was not a Good Thing, so clearly, Something Had To Be Done!  You can sort-of see what I did here.


But it's clearer in the last shot.

Then  I took some scrap plastic from my scrap box (it was part of a no-longer-needed plastic L plate.)  I cut two strips, and glued them along each side with Superglue. The top of each strip is flush with the top of the stand.

(The other solution would have been to get square cover slips, but I already had these.)


And that was that.