PICTURESof a guy who makes neon signs.
Nigel Barnes is the owner of Electric Spaghetti Neon, his company that creates and restores neon signs across Portland Oregon. Barnes has restored antiques for various companies for most of his career, before opening his own business to work on neon signs full time.
Nigel Barnes creates his neon signs from a small studio in his home’s backyard. Here he works through every stage of the process, starting with drawing the designs, cutting, heating, and bending the glass, adding gas and electrodes, and finally sealing the tube and mounting the sign.
Barnes slowly stencils where to heat the glass for his current neon sign project. Doing this is crucial to the sign making process, as it shows where the next letter of the sign will begin its bend.
Using a burner, Barnes heats the glass tube for two to three minutes until it is malleable enough to shape. Once the glass is hot enough he will only have about thirty seconds to shape it before it becomes too cool.
The skull is a sign Barnes created using scrap tubing from other projects. Instead of throwing away the extra glass, Barnes opts to create colorful signs to display in his studio.