Brown side panels? I always thought of them as a blackish color. White trim all around the sides of the panels, white front and top? Lift up on the panels, they pop right off. Sometimes they're pretty stuck, but they just lift off. -Ian

On Mon, Apr 21, 2008 at 10:37:39AM -0700, silvercreekvalley wrote: Sure thing. If you can find an identifying number, or at the very least, provide dimensions (to the nearest inch), there were several types of cabinets in the "corporate cab" line from that time frame. Some of them have snap-out sides - the white rims don't come off without tools, but the brown panels push out (perhaps after removing a couple of small bolts). Others, probably the majority, have large mushroom-headed studs on the racks that mate with tapered slots on the side panels. Many of those are difficult to remove. We always used a couple of 2x4s, one on the ground as a fulcrum, the other used as a lever. You drop the fulcrum timber on the ground parallel to the side, a few inches away, then only put about 1/2" of the lever under the white lip of the side panel, and apply a moderate amount of steady force. I'd check the inside area of the rack first, for any possible bolts that might mate the side to the rack. There was another style of cabinet that height, several inches longer than usual to accomodate things like RA60 drives. Those might need tools to get the sides off. To help narrow down what you have, there might be (should be) a 1"x3" label with a DEC logo, possibly a serial number, and a model number that might look like "H-xxxx" or "BTXXX" or something like that. You can look up that number to see what was originally in the cabinet, or at least what style of cab it is. Thinking back, the type with the press-in sides might have been a PDP-8-only variety, but I suppose it could have been loaded with an -11 of some flavor. I never saw one of those full of VAX peripherals. If you know what your rack was doing when it was new, that might help narrow down which type it is, too. -ethan -- Ethan Dicks, A-333-S Current South Pole Weather at 21-Apr-2008 at 17:50 Z South Pole Station PSC 468 Box 400 Temp -90.6 F (-68.1 C) Windchill -128.4 F (-89.1 C) APO AP 96598 Wind 8.8 kts Grid 50 Barometer 676.9 mb (10745 ft) Ethan.Dicks at usap.gov http://penguincentral.com/penguincentral.html