DIY 19" Rack

Jani Reinikainen,

This was my attempt to solve the problem of having as much hardware as possible in as little space as possible.

Currently, it's the home of my DSL router, one 8-port switch, two webservers, one testing environment, one printer, one UPS and my good old Commodore 64 (new version). The rack is a real space saver.

Overall the project was quite successful, even though I didn't get the width quite up to 19" (it's 18,75" now), but that doesn't really matter, as I didn't have any 19" hardware at that time either.

Next time I'll try my luck at welding one and making it a "real" 19" rack.

"But why?", you might ask. Well, for starters, I like building things. Secondly, 19" racks are really expensive. The total cost of this project is about 40 € (which is about 100 € less than the cheapest 19" racks I could find). It's polished now, so it looks much nicer than in these photos.

Click on the thumbnails for larger images.