John Sayers' Recording Studio Design Forum Archive

Hi All,
Has anyone seen, or does anyone have different types of plans for building racks out of wood ?

They are really pretty simple to build. You can go really cheap with a couple of pieces of plywood cut to whatever height and depth you want and use pieces of 1x2 hardwood for the mounting rails (drill holes for your mounting screws based on the hole spacing of your gear and use wood or drywall screws to attach the gear).

A little more elaborate and permanent design is to procure pre-drilled steel rails from any of the online suppliers (ie. Musicians Friend, etc.). I built a 10 space rack this way using a set of the 10 space rails. The spacing between the rails needs to be slightly greater than 19 inches (ie. 19 1/8 inches). Then it is just building a 4-sided box to contain the rails, again with the inside width at about 19 1/8 inches. In my rack I added a heavy duty drawer slide to the bottom of the rack and then mounted this assembly inside a cabinet to allow me to pull it out for wiring changes, etc.

Anyway, I haven't ever seen any plans, but they are really easy to construct.

Have fun,
Darryl.....

http://www.saecollege.de/reference_mate ... ttings.htm

cheers
john

smog wrote:Hi All,
Has anyone seen, or does anyone have different types of plans for building racks out of wood ?

I see John Sayers still has my original home studio pictures up, so take a look at this profile:

http://www.johnlsayers.com/Studio/Pages/Monkey1.htm

Its all gone as that "studio" was just a temporary situation so I could use my gear while I figured out what I wanted to do "for real".

Anyway, in a nutshell, I attached a 2x4 at true vertical to the side wall, then attached a 19" rack rail. Then I attached two blank plates to the rail, then another 19" rack rail to the plates, Then lined up a 2x4, and screwed it to the floor. I continued this until the width of the room was filled in with racks. Since the ceiling was slanted on that side, this was a good use of space because I couldn't stand there I simply put the deeper equipment towards the bottom, and the shallower midi modules and patch bays towards the top, so they wouldn't interfere with the ceiling slant.

The rack rails came from a 42U relay rack that I cut into 18U sections for the bottom, and 6U sections for the top, then sliced the channels lengthwise (breaking the C channel into two L channels), so I could get more rack rails out of the one relay rack. The C-channel relay rack had threaded holes on the front, and the back, so I got 84U out of one rack.

The rack was a leftover from a company I worked for, so it had no cost. You can buy similar aluminum relay racks on e-bay for about 70-100, then cut them up to your specifications. I cut mine using an aluminum cutting blade in a circular saw, nothing fancy by any means.

Hope that helps.