The rack means everything

Before building this "flexy" rack I was using these big, ugly chrome grill type shelving units from costco. Well, they do the job but they were just too big and too ugly for my taste, so i set out to build a good looking, yet strong and affordable rack to put all my gear on.

When i used to look through the Audioadvisor catalog i would always see the Salamander Archetype racks and say, those look soo easy to build, and look how much they want for em! Well i did something about it and built one for myself. The shelves are made of 3/4 inch birch plywood which has some Sikkens stain and a couple of coats of polyurethane.

The rods are 5/8 inch all thread metal rods, after building it i should have gone with 3/4 inch rods but these were the biggest ones the hardware store had. Unlike most designs of this type of rack i did not use any washers or rubber washers with the construction, simply because i dont believe they are needed and i didnt like the way it looked. Once assembled and tightened up the rack is very solid and i would not hesitate to try standing on it.

Some of the most important things you have to remember when building one of these is to cut the shelves all exactly the same and its very important to make sure all your holes line up as close to exact as you can get them or you will have a crooked rack.

You can see the Air Mass isolation platform I made under the cd player, it basically consists of a plywood platform with "retainer" peices on the side to both conceal the innertube as well as keep it in place. Underneath is a 20 inch bicycle innertube. Simple? yes. Honestly i cant hear a difference with the platform in use or not but when you place the platform on top of something like a speaker, and put a hand on the speaker and a hand on the platform you can definetly feel a difference.