seeking advice on moving PDP 11 and related gear

[Noel Chiappa]

    > From: tony duell

    > OK, I've done it many times, but ... I had the drives out in under 5
    > minutes. It is not that hard...

With a previously un-seen rack, it is _not_ guaranteed to be that easy, as
Bill D and I can attest!

Twice I've been up to get racks with stuff in them from him, and both times I
had the same thought: 'Oh, no problem, we'll just whip the units out of the
racks, and then load the resulting smaller objects.' Not so fast, kemo sabe.
On both occasions there was an hour-long struggle to get things out of the
rack; in both cases some of the bolts that held the slides onto the rack
(removing them being the usual approach when something won't come out of the
slides - detach the slides from the rack) were not all accessible
without... getting the unit in the slides out. (Catch-22...)

One time, we had an RK05 hang up because the front size Dzus fastener on the
RK05 cover had popped out, and it was in the vertical channel of the H960
where i) we couldn't get to it, and ii) it prevented movement of more than an
inch either way. The worse (worst) one was a BA11K that had one of its slides
rust, and freeze. We finaly had to give up on getting that out, and load the
rack with the BA11 still in it. That particular slide is _still_ frozen; my
son and I finally resorted to partially disassembling the rack (one of the
lowboy corporate racks) by punching out a couple of rivets, to get the BA11
out of it with the entire slide still attached; once out, we could then get
the slide off the BA11.

So I will echo the advice to take tools. Lots of tools.

	Noel