Can I use that Kool-Aid pic for the loading screen?
So yesterday the nephews were supposed to arrive at 10am. But they have another uncle... and he is lazy. Didn't get out of bed until noon, cooked up a large breakfast, invited his friend out [he is visiting our parents, which is where the nephews were, and we live on an island] so after he picked his friend up from the 2 hour ferry ride it was 4:30 before they arrived! I was a little annoyed considering we have so little time to get this together.
My 12 year old nephew wants to be a carpenter when he grows up, and the 13 year old wants to be a video game programmer/designer. What a great combination of interests for building an arcade machine. We got to work quickly [everything including tools were waiting for them when they got here, all ready to go]. The slowest part was measuring because I made the kids do it and then I checked their work. We did that inside because it was freaking hot yesterday. As you can see, we didn't use math for the circle - my nephew pulled down my autographed drum head from the wall and said "This looks about right" and it was a near-perfect fit. It was about a 1/4 too small so we decided to draw two circles, one that lined up top to middle and one that lined up bottom to middle and kind of smoothed it over in the center. Turned out pretty good.
Between the circular saw and the jigsaw we made quick work of cutting out the sides and the back [since it is just one piece]. You may think that 12 and 13 is too young to be using power tools, and maybe there is some truth to that. But it depends on the maturity of the kids, their desire to do a good job and their ability to concentrate. The excitement and interest from the boys into this project is intense. The only cutting I did was the circle because they were too worried about messing it up. Of course we did talk in great length about safety and proper use of the tools. I also made it clear that there was no workers compensation available on this job.
I set the height of the slot cutter and let them share the routing duties. No slip ups or anything. It's a strange situation I have with this. My parents [the grandparents] treat them like kids - I treat them like people. Endless arguments have arisen because I let them do things that they wouldn't be allowed to do at the grandparent's house. For example power tools - they wanted to build something so my mom bought them a hot glue gun. Gaaaahhh. The sides turned out excellent! The camera sat out in the sun all day and noone took pictures, these pictures are from after they left. They'll be back tomorrow afternoon!