Building up the 8E system, questions - advice - partsRequest

[Noel Chiappa]

    > From: Jay West

    > I need to rack the RK05 and the TU56. On the RK05 - does anyone have a
    > spare set of slides or can I definitely just use RL02 slides (which I
    > have lots of)?

All the RK05's I've ever seen used the wide slides that DEC used on their
older -11's. So if you have a spare set of e.g. BA11-K slides, you can use
them to 'hang' the RK05.

The company that made those slides for DEC is still in business, and still
sells similar slides; I toyed with the idea of buying a set, and seeing if
they were compatible (maybe only on the bolt-hole level, not on the slide
insertion level, from the pictures), but the cost (~$200, IIRC) dissuaded me
so far.

All the RL02's I've seen use the later, narrower slides. Maybe there's some
way to attach an RL02-type inner to RK05, but without trying it, I couldn't
say.

    > I have the wide grey inner slides on the RK05 but no outers and I
    > noticed just one of the inner slides has a gold L-catch release on it
    > so I'm wondering if there's anything special about RK05 slides. 

That gold L-catch doesn't ring a bell for me. Maybe your RK05 has different
slides on it from most of them? Picture(s)?

AFAIK the wide grey inner slides on most RK05's are stock; I just checked,
and a BA11-K outer slide fit it just fine. (I can check some other types,
e.g. -11/10N, if there is any use to that.)

	Noel