Rack Hacks: Tilting the Amp

The amp didn’t fit in the mixer rack, so I designed and printed a spacer to tilt it. 3D printers are still awesome.

I have an old mixer, amp, and power conditioner. I bought a rack stand a few weeks ago to hold them. As many Amazon reviewers said, the stand’s bottom rack space is useless because the rack tilts it into the table. In my case, the rear bar also prevented plugging in the amp’s power cord.

Since the mixer doesn’t use all of its bottom space, I could tilt the amp up. The tricky part is making the screws align with the amp and the rack. I came up with this. (Second spacer cut away to show internal passages)

At the skinny end, a single machine screw goes through both the amp and the rack. The smaller block sits in front to make a face parallel to the screw head.

At the wide end, there are two screws. One sits in a blind hole and screws into the rack. The other goes through the amp and screws into the spacer. Since the top of the spacer is in compression, that screw is under minimal strain, so soft plastic works fine.

There is a passage to get a hex-key wrench onto the inner screw. It is tilted up 19°, but a ball-end wrench works fine.

The whole rack looks like this.

I printed those red washers at the same time to make the whole assembly a little more cheery. And I used M5 screws by mistake. In this project, I learned that M5 and 10-32 screws are almost the same size. Oops.

Now I have an extra space at the top of the rack. I have a couple of 1U synths; I just need to decide which one I like better.

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