Project RetroCadeAfter years of thinking about building my own Mame Cabinet I recently stumbled upon some building sites and decided to go ahead and live the dream.
I'll base my build on Project MAME by Rasmus Kønig Sørensen:

I also used the Google Sketchup drawings of this project done by Remco (ViperLook, in Dutch):

I think I will just name it RetroCade as I really like it and am in no need of a unique name. I will create my custom artwork though as I don't just want to order the standard RetroCade artwork being out there. For now i'm inspired by several builds on this forum like:

Scratch Build Custom Street Fighter Arcade Cabinet
and

Scratch - Marvel v Capcom: Revolution
I will not have that much time working on it and need to gain all kind of skills but i'm eager to learn.
I bought some MDF (I will use 15mm and 12mm)...

Drew the first side panel...

My first attempt was not a success as I tried to fully cut it out using the jigsaw. I messed up the smooth curves. I put too much pressure on the saw messing up the angle of the cut.

After some more reading I figured I would use a router. I never touched a router before so this was an adventure on it's own. I'm no wood worker at all being a software engineer all my life...
I first roughly cut out the full shape using the jigsaw and afterwards used the router to trim it to its final shape. Routing was really easy and fun. I will use that baby a lot from now...

And there it is. The first part is done.

And then it started to snow and my workshop was not usable anymore.
Time to do some more reading, planning and testdriving my Hyperspin setup. I Compiled my own version of MAME with highscores and no warning screens and fired up good old Donkey Kong. It must have been about 30 years ago I played that machine after my soccer practice. Still great fun. Even my kids enjoy it as much as their Wii and iPad.