[Beowulf] Yet another type of strange rack rail

David Mathog mathog at caltech.edu
Thu Jun 29 15:52:01 PDT 2006


Oh great gurus of rack hardware, please enlighten me.

We just bought a Quantum DLT-S4 for backup purposes.  As is usually
the case with such things it came with a set of sliding rails which look
absolutely nothing like the installation diagram.  These are made by
"King Slide" whose web site 

    http://www.kingslide.com.tw/

was massively uninformative.  Quantum wasn't any help and I've yet
to here back from the subcontractor who sold quantum the rails.

These rails have to go into a rack with square holes.  The back
part of the sliding rail is more or less normal looking but
the front is strange.  There is a thumb screw that comes in from the
tape drive that goes through a small hole in the middle flange.
This flange is raised above the other two flanges which flank it
and which have to hold the mounting screws.

I'll try to draw it...


side view

------+
     ||    A
     ||  
         ||                 up
         || B      back<-  rack -> front
     ||                     down
     ||    A
------+

top view

-----------
     ||  ||                center
     ||  ||                rack
      A   B                outside

A=two flanges for mounting bolts
B center flange for thumbscrew.

Normally these things mount flush on the inside of the front
rail.  No way that will work with this.  If flange B is put
flush against the front the mounting bolts will crush it when
they are tightened (assuming that I can hang nuts on the
back side of A, blindly, inside the case.  It sort of looks like
the front rail is supposed to slide _behind_ the mounting flanges
A, but unless the tape drive is especially narrow I wouldn't
expect it to fit then.

The thing came with two different size mounting screws and caged
nuts for the smaller size screw.

Suggestions?

Thanks,

David Mathog
mathog at caltech.edu
Manager, Sequence Analysis Facility, Biology Division, Caltech



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