I've been collecting slide rules since I was in Junior High. At one point, around 15 years ago, I lost my whole collection and have been rebuilding it ever since. The trouble with my new collection, though, is that it's just been sitting in a pile on my dresser: nowhere, really, to be seen. So I took it upon myself to build some display stands to get them out in the open.
It's quite a basic design. I made a jig for my table saw so that all of the triangle sides are cut at the same angle and at the same length. Then I cut the bases by eye on the chop saw and glued them up. I held them together with staples as they dried and then pulled the staples. The dowel holders on the bottom go through the back and extend out about 1 3/8" so that they act as the legs upon which the whole things leans. I wanted to be able to display two per stand, hence the second level of dowels. They work pretty well.
As you can see, I'm sharing our display cabinet with Sarah's basket collection and a bunch of history books but at least now the slide rules are out in view! There isn't enough room to show them all, so I just have the best ones out. The others are displayed on the desk where I do my daily work.
As it turns out, I'm not nearly as geeky about my slide rules as some people on the internet. Still, though, I enjoy having them and I even know how to use them for the simple stuff: multiplication, division, square roots, and cube roots. But that's enough to get me by. When I was a junior in high school I took a physics class in which we were not allowed to use calculators in our daily class and lab work: we could only use slide rules. Our teacher had a giant six or eight foot long slide rule hung above the chalk board at the front of the class upon which he did all his calculations. He was almost 7' tall. It was an impressive sight!
