For several years my wife has been collecting geological samples from all over the world (ebay is great for that) and we used to display the samples in our dining room china cabinet. That Queen Ann style furniture gave way to a more modern style which left us with no place to display the rocks. They are now on display in a zipped-up glasses storage box.
Fluorescent minerals respond with different colors when they are illuminated with Ultraviolet light. Ultraviolet, or UV, is a spectrum of colors that are a higher frequency/shorter wavelength than our eyes ability to perceive. Most people are familiar at least a little bit with “Black Lights”. For reference our eyes can pick up from about 380 (violet) to 700 (red) nm. On the other end of the spectrum – infrared your TV controller probably operates at about 940nm. You can’t see it but your phone camera probably can; try it.
UV for mineral display is a little more complicated than that. Some minerals respond to “longwave” lights – lights around 365 nanometers (nm) in wavelength. Some respond to what is called “shortwave” UV light down around 260nm. There are even some that really only respond (fluoresce) to mid range UV in the 310nm region.
For other sites that speak more to the mineral aspect of this there is the Fluorescent Mineral Society (https://uvminerals.org/) as well as sites that both sell and educate such as https://www.minershop.com/ and https://www.naturesrainbows.com/
The thing with that UV illumination is that it can be a danger to the viewer. So a display case HAS to have a way to contain the UV in the case while allowing the visible light out for enjoyment. That’s some serious sunburn inside the cabinet.
We didn’t like any of the display cabinets we shopped for. They were either small, ugly (and usually not too useful) or too hard to rework to our needs. We ended up deciding on an IKEA PAX closet piece because we liked the pullout trays that were available in it to “display” some less spectacular samples while being able to keep each one labeled for type and location. What the PAX doesn’t do is have a glass display door to that will involve some later “Ikea hacking”
Here’s a view of the cabinet outline. The shelves and drawers mostly aren’t in. This is just the stage of test fitting ideas and locations together.
For a location we chose a room in the basement that is mostly dark during the day with the lights off. The IKEA piece is just under two feet deep and so rather than having the display project out in the room that far I did a little peeking to see that the area behind where we were going had almost a foot of empty space behind it (that’s just the way the beam posts lined up in the basement. Cutting out that part of the wall meant sacrificing 20 years of child height measurement scratched on the wall.
I knew I was going to have to move some plumbing to do that. When the basement finished, because that space was designated to be unused, the plumbing for the bar sink on the other side of the wall just came down in the empty space since that was easier than dodging the structure. I cut a small hole first at shoulder height so I could peek in and confirm there was no wiring in the space I wanted to cut. After confirming I was in the clear I cut out the rough space and checked on the plumbing.
Copper pipe is fairly easy to solder and I’ve done a fair amount of it. The hot water pipe just didn’t have a path, though. Between the drain wye and some of the structure there just wasn’t a nice straight path for copper. PEX and Sharkbite to the rescue. This is actually my first time using a Sharkbite fitting on anything I’m leaving in the wall.
A bit more detailed trimming to the size of the display case and remove the sole plate and back to the first picture, the closet piece fits in its new location.
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