Well, if you really want cheap,...
    We lay bench paper on the counter, wet it, lay the slides on the
paper,and put old cafeteria trays over the slides.  We even reuse the bench
paper for a week, storing it in the refrigerator after use to discourage
mold.  It works great.
    If we need to do smaller numbers of slides, we buy large square petri
dishes, and use those.  The per case price is sort of expensive, but we
reuse the petri dishes (as well as the bench paper inside them) for a very
long time.  They are compact, portable and stackable.  They are clear, but
if we need dark, we just throw a towel over it.

Supply sources:
    1)  bench paper:  Biowipe, heavy absorbant, 16"x100¹ roll (2 roll/cs)
        The manufacturer is Current Technologies, cat# BH10600ET.
        We purchase from:  Fisher    cat# 14412-52A       $83.94/case.
This manufacturer has other variations on this product as well.  One of them
has essentially the same description, except it is called "super absorbant".
DON'T get that kind.  It is kind of puffy and lumpy, and it's hard to get
the slides to lie flat.
    2)  large square petri dishes:
        Dish, petri, square, 240mm x 240mm, polystyrene, non-sterile
        The manufacturer is:  Nunc-Nalgene, cat# 240835
        We purchase from:  VWR, cat# 25384-002 ;   16ea/case    $103.95/case
                      or:  Fisher, cat# 12-565-224, 16ea/case    $94.32/cs

           
Best of luck,

Phyllis Davie
PhenoPath Laboratories, Seattle, WA
pdavie@phenopath.com
--------------------------


on 8/23/01 4:51 PM, Cathy Gorrie at C.Gorrie@unsw.edu.au wrote:

> No, not cheap, just incredibly practical. I use an almost identical system.
> Cathy
> 
> At 2:29 PM -0600 23/8/01, Jan Shivers wrote:
>> I'm embarrassed to admit how cheap I am, but you asked for suggestions...
>> 
>> Back when I was doing manual IHC, I used a metal 9x13" cake pan (with lid)
>> from a discount store (about $3 at the time), lined the bottom with a wet
>> paper towel, and used disposable 1 ml glass pipets as my slide racks
>> (fastened onto a plastic strip with grooves cut into it so the pipets
>> wouldn't roll around).  Twenty slides fit in here perfectly, ten to a rack.
>> 
>