What to do with the pottery

After several months with these neolithic pots laying around on my bedroom floor (because of the round bottoms, they really do lay around), I decided that I would have to design some sort of way of keeping them elevated above the floor.  To get an idea of what my options were, I searched Google for images of museum pottery displays and decided that I liked a minimalist design that consisted of a rigid wire hoop mounded to a wall or a stand.  Searching for premade version of these stands proved disappointing as the best thing I could find was $30 per stand.  Because I really wasn't ready to invest that much money into something that probably wasn't even going to be permanent, I decided to try to reproduce this style of pottery holder with the materials available to me at my local hardware store.  This post is a brief documentation of my design. 

The shaped copper pot holder. 

To make the metal hoops for holding the pottery, I decided to use 1/4" soft copper tubing.  There are generally two types of copper tubing available in US stores: soft copper, which bends easily and rigid copper, which is very hard to bend.  The soft and hard types of copper are really chemically the same thing, the only real difference between them is that the soft copper has been annealed with heat, while the hard copper has been hardened through physical manipulation.  Hard copper can be made soft again by heating it with a propane torch and then rehardened by repeatedly bending or hammering.   Although soft copper tubing is initially too pliable to hold up against the weight of the pottery, the sawing, hammering, and bending required shape the copper hardened it enough to hold my pots (don't try this at home without thoroughly testing it). 

To mount the hoops to the wall, I attached each hoop to its own 2x4x4 inch wooden block and then attached the blocks to a several foot long 2x3 inch board that was nailed to the wall.  The hoops were attached to the wooden blocks using a combination of nails hammered through the piping into each wooden block and a clamp-like device.  It's possible that either version would have worked alone, but I felt that the two methods worked well together.  To nail the hoops to the blocks, I hammered the last quarter inch of each end flat and drilled one 1/16th inch hole through each flat part.  These flatted and holed ends were then affixed to their corresponding 2x4x4 inch wooden blocks with small brads.  For the second method of affixing the hoops, the clamp, a small 4x1/2x1/4 piece of wood was placed over the hoop and affixed to the 2x4x4 inch wooden block with a 1/4 inch bolt. 

The end result was a row of pot holders affixed to outside wall of my newly built darkroom.