Fire$torm
09-27-12, 07:47 PM
The thought of having a computer sitting in a non-regular room on concrete has been bothering me since I caught this max credit bug. So when the chance came to use some Lowes plastic money, well.......
I used PVC piping for several reasons. First it is super easy to cut using a ratcheted hand cutter. Two, it cannot rust like every steel storage unit I've ever seen. 3rd, if it gets wet, say from minor flooding, it will NOT conduct electricity.
It took me longer to come up with a proper design then it did to build the thing. That's because the one thing that took a bit to figure out was the amount of tubing the different connectors used up when inserting piping. Turns out all the connectors eat up the same amount. So then it was just a matter of calculating the lengths for the straight sections.
BTW: Although it doesn't look it, this project used up 48+ FEET of 1" PVC pipe. The piping comes in 10 ft lengths and when I was cutting off pieces for the various sections I just winged it when trying to minimize waste. I was lucky in that at the end of 4 of 5 10' pipes I had less then 2" of waste each. Make a bad cut (didn't follow the rule: measure twice, cut once) and ended up with 10 inches wasted. Still not bad as I've only done PVC plumbing work once before in my life....
So here are the pics.
http://imageshack.us/a/img651/8947/rackfrontviewsmall.png http://imageshack.us/a/img443/1517/racksideviewsmall.png
Note: One minor goof happened when attaching the section. The unit is a "closed system" when finished, The problem with closed mechanical systems is that air does not compress well. This did not occur to me until afterwards so looking at the front view, top left, you will notice that section angles to the left slightly. If only I had I drilled a 1/4" hole somewhere......
I used PVC piping for several reasons. First it is super easy to cut using a ratcheted hand cutter. Two, it cannot rust like every steel storage unit I've ever seen. 3rd, if it gets wet, say from minor flooding, it will NOT conduct electricity.
It took me longer to come up with a proper design then it did to build the thing. That's because the one thing that took a bit to figure out was the amount of tubing the different connectors used up when inserting piping. Turns out all the connectors eat up the same amount. So then it was just a matter of calculating the lengths for the straight sections.
BTW: Although it doesn't look it, this project used up 48+ FEET of 1" PVC pipe. The piping comes in 10 ft lengths and when I was cutting off pieces for the various sections I just winged it when trying to minimize waste. I was lucky in that at the end of 4 of 5 10' pipes I had less then 2" of waste each. Make a bad cut (didn't follow the rule: measure twice, cut once) and ended up with 10 inches wasted. Still not bad as I've only done PVC plumbing work once before in my life....
So here are the pics.
http://imageshack.us/a/img651/8947/rackfrontviewsmall.png http://imageshack.us/a/img443/1517/racksideviewsmall.png
Note: One minor goof happened when attaching the section. The unit is a "closed system" when finished, The problem with closed mechanical systems is that air does not compress well. This did not occur to me until afterwards so looking at the front view, top left, you will notice that section angles to the left slightly. If only I had I drilled a 1/4" hole somewhere......