[Beowulf] flange clearance on sliding rails

[Paul Armor]

Hi,
in the last 1-1.5 years, we've started buying various vendors hardware, 
and have also been having problems 'cause everybody's wares are different; 
and we've had to engineer some interesting solutions to mount our 
hardware.

Luckily for us, Graybar has a local presence where I can walk in with 
parts that I don't know the name of and be helped by someone who has a 
better idea of the proper (industry) names and the like.  They can be 
found online at:

www.graybar.com

from which you can download catalogs in pdf format.  Their staff is also 
quite helpful and patient over the phone.  I will also say up front that 
their prices vary, so if your uni has a contract the prices aren't so bad, 
but walking in off the street you may pay a premium.

Also, regarding rackmount servers and the like, I would warn everyone of a 
situation we still haven't resolved with the series of 5u - 24bay chassis 
made by AICIPC.  AIC rates them at 150lbs, Accuride (who actually makes 
the slide kits) rates them at 85-115 lbs (depending on depth of 
rack/cabinet).  So we have a few servers right now that we don't extend to 
work on unless we've got a palette jack underneath "just in case"; and 
they do bow under the 135lb load we're putting on them!

http://www.lsc-group.phys.uwm.edu/~parmor/Rail-pics/

Cheers,
Paul


On Thu, 20 Oct 2005, David Mathog wrote:

>
>> Is there some other standard way (3?) for mounting the fixed
>> part of the sliding rails on racks with square holes?
>
> Don't know where you can buy these screws, if anywhere, but
> have a gander at Patent 20050214099, which you can see as
> a PDF for free from here:
>
>  http://www.freepatentsonline.com/
>
> (It can be had from the USPTO as well but they require some oddball
> plugin to view the patent images.)
>
> This suggests to me another solution, which is to either use
> a screw with a really big head, or to use two washers,
> one that fits tightly within the square hole but around the
> screw (to bear some of the load in the -Y direction) and a
> larger one that fits over the square hole (to allow the
> screw heat to clamp to the front of the rack and not onto the
> interior washer.  I'm thinking it might be easier to find
> these two washer sizes than to find either the big headed
> screw or the odd conical washers.
>
> Regards,
>
> David Mathog
> mathog at caltech.edu
> Manager, Sequence Analysis Facility, Biology Division, Caltech
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+ UWM-LSC Group Systems Administrator        parmor at gravity.phys.uwm.edu +
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