Test Tube Racks for Vallejo Paints

Over the years, my old acrylic paints in their squat bottles have gradually given way to the ubiquitous Vallejo hobby paints.  While the Vallejos give nice results in general, the skinny containers have led to storage problems on my workspace.  If they all mixed well enough to be stored right side up, everything would be fine. But you know the drill, some of the tubes don't mix well and seem to work better if stored upside down.  I find this to be even more the case with the Reaper Master Series Paints.

The end result was increasing chaos at my painting area, with bottles randomly propped upside down or toppling over.  The dedicated paint racks such as the ones sold by Progengspere on UK eBay, while very nice indeed, are quite expensive.

Oddly enought, the inspiration for a cheaper solution came at work. I work for a medical device company, supervising R&D production on the evening shift.  We recently renovated our production area, now with a clear view through a window into an adjacent analytical test lab.  While looking into this lab one night, I happened to see a large inventory of empty test tube racks stored there.  Hmmm....what if these could be found in a larger size, say big enough to hold a Vallejo bottle ?!

I did a quick search online, keeping in mind the Vallejo bottle width of 24mm.  It didn't take long to find what I was looking for on Amazon: "TEST TUBE RACK PLASTIC for 24 tubes 25mm - by Scientific Equipment of Houston."   $7.50 each. Bingo.  This is what it looks like completely assembled.

I didn't install the top tier in the interest of viewing the paints better, but there's no reason it wouldn't work completely assembled in stock format as well.