Nervous about setting heaviest item not on lowest shelf?

Total disaster although it looks like an attachment point failed on this one. Thing is with tempered glass, one tiny flaw in the glass is a stress riser just waiting to fail.

BillWojo

 

Tempered glass is extremely strong.

Is it's rated for it then let her rip. As someone sais, if kinda top heavy, then rack should be secured to wall behind it with strap or brace.

I would be most concerned with sufficient air flow for my amp.

 

Years ago I had a shop and we did a lot of custom metal work for the museum industry. One of my customers told me a story about an installation that he was working on.
There were some huge display cases along a wall with 10' x 10' tempered glass panels. They were inserted into a custom built metal frame work with rubber edge gaskets and bolted tight. As he was leaving for the day and in another part of the museum he heard a very loud explosion.
Upon entering the room there were glass fragments everywhere including pieced sticking out of a sheet rocked wall on the other side of the room.
There is a lot of energy stored up in tempered glass. It always makes me a little nervous walking by huge panes of it now. Lucky for him, he was in another part of the building, five minutes earlier he had been in that room for most of the day.

BillWojo

 

That stand is a design catastrophe. Yer problem is not with the glass there...

That just isn't happening with something like this: HiFi Furniture Milan Reference 10 Hi-Fi 3 Support

The version I'm using has another shelf with plenty breathing space for large amp.

 

that Milan Reference rack you linked to is brilliant. Adding a shelf is effortless, and it seems like replacing those side wood panels with taller ones would be effortless as well.

 

The Milan series are all modular, so switching and swapping the shelves is as easy as an easy thing.

When I bought the new kit, setting up the rack was the easiest part...

 

I explained the reasons in post #10.

 

Not a bad idea! I like it.

 

Tempered glass makes for beautiful looking racks but, although I try not to get too scientifical, my experience is that glass makes musical sounds, to what degree, depends of course. Also, many glass shelved racks have significant braced posts centered in the back of the rack which, for me, really compromises cable experimentation & cable isolation / layout. Look for an all steel rack where most often the bottom shelf is designed for a heavy amp & see if a DIY stainless mesh wired screened cage surrounding that bottom shelf might look decent & protect your infant.

 

Why not put it on the bottom shelf with something in front of it to keep little fingers away? You could use the glass shelf you are taking out, if you want to look at it a lot.

 

I suggest you hire the guy responsible for these to properly set up your gear rack.



Jeff

 

(No)
Steel, metals, marble, slate, granite, and other alloys such as aluminum and magnesium do not seem to develop cracks and fatige as glass COULD. I am not saying it will. Although It has been proven that over extended periods (many decades?) that glass windows in old buildings will eventully become SLIGHTLY wider at the bottoms of the panes and narrower at the top. Proving it is not as stable as say steel or granite.
What I am really getting at is why use glass when one could use any number of other things and pretty much eliminate the concern ?

 

My gut tells me that a curious small child could attempt to climb this tall rack and tip it over. It’s quite tall, and with 100lb on the topmost shelf it’d certainly possible a 3 or 4 year old could use his weight to actually pull it over. Some of the members suggestions of strapping it something to stop lateral movement will probably be necessary at some point in the future.

As for the integrity of the stand, curious children notwithstanding, I think this rack will be fine and dandy with 100lb on top. It troubles me that the max rated total weight is 350lb, but as long as your under it you should be fine. If I were you I’d invest in some wooden furniture. If it’s out of your budget, maybe save up for it? It only makes sense to pair solid as a rock gear with a solid as a rock rack. Some solid maple should do the trick. I know it’s more expensive, but there’s a reason it is! 2 inch maple shelves can probably support 1000lb each... honestly your floor might give way before the shelf does. Heh.

Thanks for noticing my avatar. It is indeed, Jiji. A very cute cat from one of my favourite movies.

 

Last December I bought my two final equipment racks. There were 2 options for the shelves: either bamboo or tempered glass. I chose bamboo in a split second, and I didn't ask myself which ones would be better sounding. The mind image of all my boxes and turntables lying shattered on the ground amidst a pile of glass splinters steered me immediately anywhere else.

 

Sorry. Not true. Not proven. An unfortunate urban legend of sorts that many believe.

Just one quote from this Scientific American article that I just found: A mathematical model shows it would take longer than the universe has existed for room temperature cathedral glass to rearrange itself to appear melted.

The glass windows in old buildings can be thicker at the bottom than at the top, but that has not changed since the day they were installed. It was non-uniform to begin with and installed that way.

Jeff

 

The Scientific Method

 

It just really simplifies things if you put a 90 lb amp on a floor amp stand. My 90 lb amp sits next to the rack on a Symposium Ultra platform- well ventilated and easy to move on and off. I believe it performs better than if it was on a rack shelf and I never have to worry about catastrophe.

 

"room temperature"
Where does one find that on an external glass?

 

Sorry. I assumed that folks would click on the link I provided and read more of the (pretty short but extremely informative) article on their own. My bad.

Here's some more of it.

Whatever flow glass manages, however, does not explain why some antique windows are thicker at the bottom. Other, even older glasses do not share the same melted look. In fact, ancient Egyptian vessels have none of this sagging, says Robert Brill, an antique glass researcher at the Corning Museum of Glass in Corning, N.Y. Furthermore, cathedral glass should not flow because it is hundreds of degrees below its glass-transition temperature, Ediger adds. A mathematical model shows it would take longer than the universe has existed for room temperature cathedral glass to rearrange itself to appear melted.

Why old European glass is thicker at one end probably depends on how the glass was made. At that time, glassblowers created glass cylinders that were then flattened to make panes of glass. The resulting pieces may never have been uniformly flat and workers installing the windows preferred, for one reason or another, to put the thicker sides of the pane at the bottom. This gives them a melted look, but does not mean glass is a true liquid.​

I hope the highlighted section at least indirectly answers your question.

Jeff

 

The old glass that distorts or flows (I have a 1900 ish home that has it) is not tempered. Tempered glass is much stronger and won't do this, whatever it is. All of your side and backglass windows in your car, plus your sunroof are made from tempered glass. Can take quite an impact on the face before shattering in a million pieces, but on the edge it is much more vulnerable. It is also much stiffer than non-tempered glass like in your house windows.

 

Fair enough. I am surely not trying to start a debate on this and I am open to the facts. However, to answer the OP question I would not use glass shelves over steel or wood for any reasons. Especially if I had a super-heavy amp or was nervous about it. I mean why ? I get astethics and all, but piece of mind outweights that any day IMO.

 

Ok perhaps I did not have my facts correct previously, but this is ABSOLUTELY not true. Certain rear glass, liftglass, and glass roof panes are very sensitive to simply being handled incorrectly. Believe me I have had them "explode" on me and seen it happen to others over 30 years of working in dealers. In the 90's rear Camaro hatch glass could shatter just from one of the hatch struts being weak and causing a flex of sort. Or by taking one loose and not properly supporting the hatch loke I did ONCE. In fact the new glass that came in boxes had stickers to show where and how to lift it out of the heavily padded shipping box. It took 3 persons and a lot of nerve just to install one. More recently I have seen many a liftgate glass on the '15-'18 Cadillac Escalade shatter due to impoper handling while loose or being installed. This is the main reason dealers use outside glass companies to do these repairs. I will never touch one again.
So my point once again is that in my mind glass can be unstable and unpredictable in an imperfect world. So why trust it as a shelf to support ANYTHING?

 

I remembered something I did as a kid. I lived near some woods and folks would sometimes use it as a dumping ground.
Well I found an old console TV and decided to demolish it. It used a thick pane of tempered glass in front of the picture tube and when I got that out of course I had to smash it. Started first with some smaller rocks and got tired of that, after pounding it with a cinder block I gave up. Disgusted I picked up the heavy pane of glass and threw it like a Frisbee.
As it was coming down it hit the tallest weeds and exploded into a million pieces, was not expecting that at all.
I'll never know the reason for it, was it scratched by my previous attempts, unlikely or it should have shattered right there and than, did it get scratched by a piece of hard dust on top of a weed or did a weed dragging across it excite it to a frequency that it didn't like? Like nails on a chalk board.
Glass is passable on a nick knack shelf for small items but I'd be dammed if I am going to put an expensive piece of heavy gear on one. Especially on the top.

BillWojo

 

Yes glass is very strong and tempered even stronger but a $3 device like this can turn it into a million pieces.

 

When I was a kid we found an old TV from probably the 60's in the woods. We thought it would blow up and threw rocks and bricks anything else we could find we tired out without ever breaking it.