Using old server ball-bearing rails/sliders for drawers?

[Solarity]

I work in the server side of IT and we normally pay money to e-waste old servers and parts like server rails/sliders. A lot of the time these rails are ball bearing and much more heavy duty than anything I have seen in any tool cabinet. They are about 3 feet long. They can vary based on server, though they typically snap into mounting universal mounting holes in the racks and normally clip onto mounts on the server. I do have a dove tail jig, though drawing a blank on what to do for a drawer bottom, maybe some type of metal rack with a thin plywood top. I am thinking of building and mounting this into a large rolling work bench.

I am curious if anyone has tried this or have any suggestions?

 

[Justind97]

You guys PAY to get rid of e-waste??!!! Around here they take it with open arms (Providing you drop it off)

But using those rack sliders is a great idea. I know how heavy some of those servers can be. But I wonder, will they hold up to all the use? I believe they would have been designed to hold the weight but not be used significantly by sliding in and out.
I know for instance I have started to wear out the slides on my tool box which was somewhat designed for heavy use.

 

[Solarity]

You guys PAY to get rid of e-waste??!!! Around here they take it with open arms (Providing you drop it off)

But using those rack sliders is a great idea. I know how heavy some of those servers can be. But I wonder, will they hold up to all the use? I believe they would have been designed to hold the weight but not be used significantly by sliding in and out.
I know for instance I have started to wear out the slides on my tool box which was somewhat designed for heavy use.

You would be surprised what we pay to get rid of I have seen bins full of power cables being tossed as we don't use the female to male standard power cables that come with servers, we use female to female connectors. Also same with network cables as we went from generic black cables to color coded based on use. The cables can be perfectly fine and they tend to be more heavy duty than what you would buy at the regular store.

Right now there is a stack of managed Cisco 24 port switches in the bins from the networking team, granted they are only 10/100.

 

[pepi]

Probably want to disable the locks, otherwise why not. Most snap onto rivets mounted to the sides of the servers, very low profile screws should be considered.

Greg

 

[kwschumm]

Depends on the quality of the rails. A lot of servers come with "economy" rails which are quite flimsy, easily bendable, with easily breakable plastic slides and catches. Remove a server from those rails twice and the rails were shot. I despised those things and always bought high quality replacements, which would be well suited for tool drawers.

 

[CoogarXR]

I have thought about the same thing. I shop at a scrap dealer that has barrels of those ball-bearing rails. I never could find a specific use for them, but yeah, it'd probably work.

 

[Falcon67]

You guys PAY to get rid of e-waste??!!! Around here they take it with open arms (Providing you drop it off)

You can't even pay to get rid of old TV and tube type monitors here anymore. If you can't beg someone to take one, you are stuck with it. Not allowed at any recycling facility. AFAIK, we have to pay some bucks to have large numbers of old PCs hauled off every so often. Same with obsolete networking equipment.

Server rack slides would work, you'd just have to either fab a cage for them or otherwise engineer the mounting - Dell rack slides typically clip into the square holes in a standard relay rack front and rear, so side mounts would be the only way. And they are usually way deeper than regular drawer slides. For simple slide in/out drawers, UPS angle brackets would also work. Lot of mid size APC units use those.

 

[rlitman]

I've tried. Haven't had much luck with it. They're just too customized for rackmount server purposes to be very good for drawers. The lengths don't fit my needs, they don't work well with most hardware, they're designed to work with attachments that aren't found on normal drawers, they've got locks you need to remove, etc.

And proper drawer hardware is better.

I have a handful of the cable extension arms from the back of servers for a time when I feel like electrifying a drawer, but that's a different project.

 

[Solarity]

These are HP servers, it looks like the older servers have the more heavy duty slides and our team lead says he needs to get rid of a lot of them. The newer servers are coming in smaller form factors and the slides seem more simple. We don't use cable extension arms, so to work on a server we have to remove the cables.

 

[kbs2244]

Why not use the whole cabinet?
But if you part one out, don't forget the casters.

 

[rlitman]

Why not use the whole cabinet?
But if you part one out, don't forget the casters.

Computer cabinets have a lot of wasted space. But you could take the rack rails out of a cabinet, and easily build them into a plywood carcass that takes up much less room. That would make putting it all together much easier, but you'd still have the limitation of only being able to make the drawer depth match the rails that you have.

I suppose if you have a lot of identical rails, AND want drawers that oddly deep depth, you could make something really nice out of it all.

But kitchen countertops (for example) are much shallower than rackmount computers.

 

[kbs2244]

The ones I have looked at were all 30 inches deep and 24 or 30 inches wide.
Glass front doors, sheet metal sides, and no backs.
Most had wire mesh shelves on the pull out sliders.

 

[cheechi]

server rails hold a lot of weight up, but only slide occasionally. Even though they may hold massive weight (5u or 6u UPS units for example) at full extension without deflecting, if you ever wear out server rails you will know it. I wouldn't use them for drawers I would open weekly let alone daily. If you have something in mind that would resemble a Lista parts cabinet you go into only occasionally, go for it.