For the outboard rack in my personal studio, I drew up plans and tasked my cabinetmaker to custom manufacture the equivalent of a kitchen island, with a countertop that’s cantilevered above the backside of a cabinet, except that the cabinet has three 19-inch equipment bays on each side instead of doors and shelves. I ordered and installed rack rails, power strips, and cable-lacing bars myself. For the front of the island, I chose AudioRax 4-Hole Rack Rails <audiorax.com>. If you’ve only seen regular 3-hole rails, let me tell you why 4-hole ones are worth the upcharge. Standard rack-spacing that follows the EIA-310 specification is 1.75-inches per Rack Unit (RU or U), with 1.25-inches between primary hole pairs, and a single center hole spaced equally from the two primary ones. Therefore, if you want to utilize all four mounting screws for a piece of rackmount gear, you have to follow the RU-spacing strictly. On the other hand, 4-hole rails, with two center holes that are 0.375-inch from their corresponding primary holes, allows you to mount gear at half-RU intervals – while still securing using all four screws. AudioRax has diagrams and videos on its website showing how the dimensions and math make this possible. That means I can leave half a rack space above my pair of way-too-hot Empirical Labs Distressors [Tape Op #32], and another half space above my four Empirical Labs FATSO processors [#24, #79], for example – and all the screws stay lined up. What’s even cooler is that AudioRax sells Adam Hall Vented 0.5U Filler Panels ($7.99) for those half-height gaps. Quality-wise, the AudioRax rails are top-notch. They have perfectly tapped #10-32 holes, a heavy-duty powder coated matte-black finish, and precision-cut ends that are carefully deburred (since they’re cut-to-order). My 17RU rails were $68 per pair. For the 18RU backside of the island (underneath the countertop that’s cantilevered for stool-height seating), the option to mount at half-RU intervals wasn’t necessary, so I purchased standard 3-hole Penn Elcom rails from AudioRax for $34.89 per pair. AudioRax also sells my favorite #10-32 Rack Screws with Washers. These are dog point fasteners, meaning they have an unthreaded tip that auto-aligns the screw into the tapped hole – you can fearlessly use an electric driver without having to hand-thread the screw first. They’re also SEMS screws, meaning they have an unthreaded shoulder just under the head that holds the washer captive. In other words, these rack screws come preassembled with nylon washers that never fall off, you can blindly screw and unscrew them with your favorite electric driver or power drill, and you'll never go looking for lost washers! $10 for 100 dog point SEMS rack-screws is a no-brainer for solving the most common headache when mounting rack gear. I threw away all my other rack screws once I discovered the AudioRax ones. On the backside of the island, I only needed to mount a few pieces of gear – near-silent Coolerguys 2RU rackmount programmable fans <coolerguys.com> and Tripp Lite RS-1215 power strips <tripplite.eaton.com> [#126]. The rest of the space is taken up by six 8RU filler panels. I wasn’t looking forward to unscrewing these panels every time I wanted to access the cabling behind them, so I attached neodymium super-magnets onto the face of the rails to hold the filler panels in place making for easy removal and remounting. I found 16 mm (0.63-inch) diameter magnets on Amazon, with a countersunk center hole sized perfectly for an M3×12 mm flat-head Allen bolt that I passed through the rack rail into an M3 knurled nut on the other side of the rail. After hand-tightening four magnets onto the rails for each filler panel, I can snap the panels onto the magnets and just as easily pull off the panels without tools.