Nice rack….
You would be forgiven for thinking that this post was about a certain part of the female body. If that is what you were looking for, then please go home now! However, if you want to find out how to make your life easier at gigs, or to be able to find problems more quickly then read on! Everyone from live engineers to AV guys, to guitarists will benefit from keeping their rack-mounted equipment neat!
This one should be obvious…. if it is 19″ wide, and has rack ears, it really should be in a decent flight case! If you have not got that far yet, bookmark this page and come back when your delivery arrives! Even the ABS Plastic racks are fine. Just some sort of protection for the equipment inside is absolutely necessary.
Along with protection, flight cases save time:
Power
You can have all your mains wired up before you take the lid off the case! You don’t have to do anything fancy with this. A plugboard on the inside of the rack. When you need to set up, you just drop the power cable out and everything is immediately powered up!
Or you could take this a little bit further. We have cut all our IEC cables to the exact length that is required (obviously leaving enough slack to route them neatly). This stops the back of the rack from getting cluttered up with lots of cable bunched up.
Looms
Realistically, if you have more than one signal cable coming out of the rack then you should use a loom. Looms take many different “cores” or cables through one lead, which is a lot neater. We have 16 compressors in a rack, and all the inserts go through one loom. Can you imagine 16 seperate insert leads coming out of the back of the rack? It would be a nightmare.
Patchbays
When you have everything inside and plugged in, it can get difficult to get at the stuff you need. Patchbays are a great way of keeping what you need to touch on the outside. You shouldn’t (hopefully) need to touch your power connections ever again, so they can be left. But inputs and outputs work great on a patchbay. See my example below!
Cable ties
Cable ties are very handy to neaten things up – but be very careful! Don’t go over the top! Leave yourself some slack in case you need to change something quickly. Make sure you don’t have to strip the entire rack just to change a fuse!
With this warning in mind – go have fun with cable ties! Tie mains power together up one side of the rack. Tie signal together down the other side.
Now lets see a nice rack!
I snook a camera into the warehouse to bring you these exclusive photo’s…. Enjoy! 
Loom for signal, small patchbay for antenna inputs, 16A mains power input and output
There is a lot going on in there, but with a few cable ties and some smart thinking, it can be kept nice and neat!
Cable ties are your friend - but can turn on you!
All our network connections for WSM (Wireless Systems Manager) go into a hub stuck to the top of the rack. Out of the way, but we can still see status lights.
A simple patchbay for outputs from an amp rack
Flight cases make the rack look good from the front too!
