Dennis Hollingsworth

Aluminum Stretcher Panels

Friend and fellow artist/painter here in Chinatown, Phil Wagner has a part time gig manning a painter's stretcher bar shop called Alustretch. A company created by Peter Raich, he has established shops in Austria, Germany (Liepzig), England (London) and now here in Los Angeles.

Here's their contact information in Los Angeles:

Alustretch US LLC
400 Cypress Ave.
Unit C
Los Angeles, CA. 90065
323 343 8781
323 687 9001 Cell

p@alustretch.us

Peter has fabricated and refined an extruded aluminum stretcher bar in two sizes/types:

H27: 1-1/16"
H40: 1-5/8"

A perfect section. Each side has an articulated aspect with a job to do. Look at what Peter has done, the nuance of the design. The lips and rails and grabs and scribed notches. The thickness of the metal and the stout proportion in a careful ratio to support the knife edge in a canvassed tension.

This assembly was designed for stretcher bars. I asked if it were possible to build a warp-proof support in a panel form. I was thinking of aircraft skin, maybe in plastic corrugated aluminum glued to the aluminum stretchers. (READ:$$$$) It turned out that luan sheets could do the trick with the existing design if you could shim them back onto the support. A bit of work.

I visited Phil at Alustretch to check out the progress on the big panels.