Next in my series of posts about the mistakes I made with my Large System Reworking Project...
Mistake #3: I've also come to the conclusion that I screwed up the Keyboard Shelf...
NO... I'm not gonna start over
... at least not yet.
I think it looks OK, but it is nowhere near perfect. The main problem is, it blocks the view of my Denon mixer. I essentially have to bend down or stoop to see the controls on the mixer. Is this a BIG problem?... Maybe not. It's not like I'm constantly adjusting the sliders on the mixer. Once I've set up and completed a sound check, the only time I would typically change anything is to turn microphones up or down (Channels 1-4). I might even be able to do that by feel.
It looks fine, however, I could have made it better. There WERE things I could have done differently, and it probably would not have taken me as long to make it. The PRIMARY reason for the modification was NOT to make a Keyboard Shelf, but to provide access to the knobs on the front of the controller (mounted in the top rack). Providing a place to set a keyboard and mouse was sort of an afterthought. I could have simply cut out the section in front, just as I did with the Gator Case I use with my Small System. However, my Small System has no base (bottom) rack, so it sits on a TABLE, which provides space for the mouse and keyboard. The Small System has only 2U of rack space in the front, so it's also not as tall as the SKB R104 rack, therefore the keyboard and mouse don't sit very low when placed on the table top. There is NO table top when using the SKB rack, and it has 4U in the front, so if the SKB rack was sitting on a table, the keyboard and mouse would be sitting much lower; perhaps uncomfortably so. The Keyboard Shelf puts the mouse and keyboard at the perfect height (level with the controller). One problem with the keyboard shelf is it does not really have enough space to effectively move a normal mouse.
I think perhaps my first problem was not understanding that the case was not symmetrical and had NO square edges. The front is thicker around the SKB logo than it is at the right and left edges (so it bows out slightly in that area), but the thickness of the plastic varied; especially from front to back. The back of the section I removed was extremely thin and flimsy, so I ended up just removing it entirely.
My design called for a shelf deep enough for my Gearhead keyboard, but the area available to remove was only half the size (depth) I needed, so I had to somehow add depth to the extended (folded down) shelf. I also wanted the rack lid to fit just as if there had been no modifications. And the choice I made to use the cutout piece of hollow plastic (for half of the shelf) may not have been a good decision. I wanted to keep the look of the original rack, including the logo and oval indentations, but it would have been SO much easier (and smarter) to scrap the cutout and fabricate a replacement in wood. Essentially, that's what I had to do anyway, because the plastic cutout was hollow, so I cut and shaped a wooden insert to fill the hollow space... THAT took A LOT of time.
Now that I switched the Gearhead keyboard/mouse combo for the Logitech combo, they are smaller, work better, and would have fit in a smaller space. I could have gotten away WITHOUT the (second) folding part of the shelf. I also should have cut the ENTIRE front section out, and used a single fold down shelf the full size of that section… It would have been fine for the smaller Logitech keyboard and Trackball mouse...
^^^^ Keyboard shelf without the second folding section extended.
If I was going to redo it, and knowing what I NOW know, I would have removed the entire front section, and made the WHOLE thing a one-piece fold-down shelf. I could fix this one by removing the remaining section below the current fold-down shelf (as outlined in red below), and then add a strip of wood to the bottom of the existing shelf...
The thing is; there's nothing I can do to avoid blocking some of the front of the upper rack as long as there's any kind of a shelf. So I might make this change eventually, but not right away.