Neon Parish

Hand-bent glass. Real gas. No LED, not ever.

Bending tube on Jefferson Street since 1961 — the only shop between Houston and New Orleans still pumping its own.

Build a sign → 508 Jefferson St · Lafayette, LA

01 / Build one

Type it. We'll bend it.

Every character is a separate piece of glass, heated to about 1,100°F and bent by hand against a paper pattern. That is why the price moves with the letter count and not the square footage.

Bon Temps

Argon & mercury · clear glass

9 of 18 characters · $306 of glass

Tube colour
Size
Backing
Your sign $0

Six to eight weeks. Half down, half when it lights. We ship crated anywhere in the lower 48.

02 / In stock

Already bent, already lit.

Shop pieces, run-ons and the odd thing a customer never came back for. One of each — when it's gone we'd have to bend it again.

A weathered porcelain enamel sign panel with chipped paint, rust and unlit neon tubing, leaning against a workshop wall.

03 / Restoration

Most of what we do is undoing 1987.

Somebody's grandfather put a beautiful sign up in 1954. In 1987 somebody else pulled the tube out and screwed a plastic box over the face of it. We take the box off.

  • Survey & condition reportFree, on site
  • Pattern from the original tubeWhere any survives
  • Porcelain enamel touch-inColour matched
  • New transformer & UL listingRequired for permits
  • Rehang & timerWe keep the old scars

We do not repaint a sign back to new. A sign that has been up for seventy years should look like it has been up for seventy years.

04 / The glass

How a straight tube becomes a letter.

  1. A craftsman bending glowing glass tube in the blue flame of a ribbon burner.

    Step one

    Bend

    Four-foot lengths of lead glass over a ribbon burner. You blow into the tube as you bend so it does not collapse, and you have about four seconds before the glass is too cold to move.

  2. Racks of clear and colored glass tubing stored in a dim workshop.

    Step two

    Bombard

    The finished letter is pumped to a vacuum and run at 20,000 volts until it glows dull red. That burns off everything stuck inside the glass. Skip it and the sign goes dim inside a year.

  3. Rain on a dark window with large magenta, cyan and amber bokeh lights behind.

    Step three

    Fill

    Neon on its own is the orange-red everybody pictures. Every other colour on the wall is argon and a drop of mercury behind a coloured phosphor. There are only two gases in the whole building.