Showcase posts related to collectible cases, museum-grade fabrication, and conservation.
The Oddy test is the materials screening a collections professional runs before approving a case vendor — and the reason blanket “tested safe” marketing claims mean nothing. What the test does, what its ratings mean for a build, and the fabricator protocol that actually works with it.
Registrars ask about dust and access before they ask about clarity — and the two questions are one design problem. The access decision that drives the sealing approach, the gasket and interface options as actually built, and why machining precision is the real sealing enabler.
Glass wins on surface hardness; acrylic wins on weight, break behavior, spans, and fabrication freedom. The comparison every exhibit designer runs, with the trade-offs conceded plainly instead of cheerled.
Somewhere past a certain size, a vitrine stops being a bigger version of a small one and becomes a different engineering problem — panels bow, sheet sizes run out, and the cover becomes a two-person lift. The design constraints to adjust for before quoting, not after.
Every one of these seven is a real spec failure with a paper trail — an unmeasurable adjective, a case dimensioned before the mount existed, an open date treated as a ship date. Each mistake pairs with its Standards-language fix, so the list doubles as an RFQ checklist.
Most damage to acrylic casework is done by cleaning it — dry cloths, glass cleaner, and sanitizing wipes, in that order. The do/don’t protocol, the chemistry behind it, and a one-page routine your gallery staff can actually follow.
UV-filtering acrylic is a material property, not a magic word — it lives on a manufacturer’s data sheet and a lot certificate, not in a vendor’s adjective. Which objects drive the decision, how to read the sheet, and the one-line spec that replaces “conservation-safe.
A vitrine that looks like a single piece of acrylic was built from five panels and four joints, and its quality was decided at specific moments in the shop. The build, step by step — so a buyer can tell a bonded vitrine from a screwed-together one.
The ten vendor-qualification questions that separate a capable casework fabricator from a hopeful one — and the specific answer each question should get.
A field-by-field guide to writing an acrylic vitrine specification in measurable terms, with a paste-able spec template. Every adjective becomes a named grade, an inspection distance, or a tolerance band.
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