Rotateable Racks are Rad!

The basic premise of installing this rack is – I think that Home Theatre (HT) gear, while necessary, is not the prettiest thing to look at and a user friendly lounge shouldn�t force the technology that enables your entertainment in your face. Because of this � I had a dedicated HT cupboard on the architects plans from early on in our renovations and have had my eye on one of these racks ever since a friend of mine told me of their existence.

Originally, I was going to simply buy some rack shelving and install it into the sides of the cupboard and hang the gear off that which would have been fine, but � given how often I change gear in and out with day job, a rotatable rack which would slide out of the cupboard and spin around in it�s entirety so I can unplug stuff and basically fnarkle around without having to drag everything out, support thousands of dollars of gear on one arm whilst extracting the device I want to switch / play with and then push it all back in minus the extracted gear (still grasped in the other hand) while all the cables fall out of the back of the gear (which then necessitates another extraction of gear and high stakes balancing act).

The Rack in place within the cupboard The Rack slid out completly The Rack rotated and allowing access to the connections at the back of the gear

So, as can be seen from the pics above, the rack is high enough to take a relatively large amount of gear, sturdy enough (assuming I screwed it into the top of my cupboard well enough) to hold the fully loaded rack outside of the cupboard and does indeed allow you to get at the back of your equipment to fiddle around when needed.

See the rack in action [1.09MB Windows Media Format]

Still to be done:

  • Attach IR blasters to gear
  • Get some blank plates to block off what doesn�t need to be accessible from the front of the rack
  • Put the doors back on the cupboard
  • Wire in the rest of the speakers
  • Source -and- program up a single remote to make all of this stuff work � easily.

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4 responses to “Rotateable Racks are Rad!”

  1. Rob Avatar

    Oh – and once the doors are on – I need to do some kind of temperature monitoring to see if things are getting too warm in there. Might need to setup a thermistor and low speed fan at the top of the cupboard…

  2. Rob Avatar

    21/10/2005 – Attached the IR blasters and receiver to the gear, first impressions are mostly positive, the main issue is the receiver is at the cheaper end of the scale to fit in with my (practically) non-existent budget and thus is picking up a lot of extraneous IR, from the sunlight (no drapes as yet) and possibly also from my cellphone and laptop, both of which spend a lot of the time in the lounge. Another possibility, though improbable, is the RF keyboard for the PVR – I’ll do some experimenting with fresh batteries etc and see how that goes.
    At the end of the day, I can always sell a kidney (or one of the kids) and get a ‘plasma friendly’ IR receiver which will set me back a couple of hundy or more
    🙁

  3. Hamish Avatar
    Hamish

    Random question Rob, where did you find this rack system? do they still exist? I want to do exactly this, 4 years on from this post.

    1. NZRob Avatar

      Good question Hamish, The unit I have was imported by a home automation friend of mine (http://living systems.co.nz) and looks pretty close to this one: http://www.middleatlantic.com/enclosure/roll/axsr… I do note however that there are a couple of new systems which are a little less 'industrial' and probably have a higher chance of gaining that all important WAF (Wife Approval Factor) http://www.middleatlantic.com/enclosure/roll/reb…. and http://www.middleatlantic.com/enclosure/roll/asr…. – I'd probably go with the ASR as I like the ability to set the gaps between equipment rather than rely on the stock feet to provide sufficient airflow 🙂