First time cocktail cabinet

[Galvatron]

Hi folks, I've gotten to a point in my project where I feel it's appropriate to start showing it off.  This is something I conceived of a long time ago, however living in the city I don't have much room for woodworking, so the project languished.  Recently I was talking about the idea with a friend of mine who's a union carpenter, and he got excited about helping out.  So, this is really a collaboration; he's doing the woodworking and I'm handling the electronics.

Basically, what we're talking about here is a 4 control panel cocktail cabinet (2 head-to-head, 2 side-by-side).  We considered tracking down an old CRT monitor/TV, but eventually decided that we just didn't want to deal with the weight.  So we're going with an LCD HDTV.  The control panels are a bit Frankenstein-like, but I had a lot of games that I *had* to be able to play (especially Arkanoid and Marble Madness).

So the first thing I did was make a model in Google Sketch-up to show my buddy what we were trying to build (due to annoyances of snapping to grid, the dimensions are a little wonky - everything should be rounded to the nearest 1/4").



My buddy quickly got to work prototyping it:


It was then that we realized the greatest advantage of using a flat-panel TV.  We can actually partially recess the control panels underneath the TV itself, since the TV is so thin.  So, another round of renders and mock-ups:



We thought this version looked great, so now it's on to the real thing!  I believe my buddy said he used cedar plywood, though he said if he had it to do over again he's use a harder wood (like oak) to get a smoother finish.  Here's the top half, unstained:


Here's the bottom half, with the stain applied:


Now we're starting to put some of the guts in.  The subwoofer was a tad deeper than we'd anticipated, meaning we'll likely have to fix one of the maintenance doors in place to give us space to mount our motherboard:


But look at how well that TV fits in!  Very exciting stuff.


Obviously, there's still a lot of work to be done, the control panels and the wiring and such.  Slagcoin was a great resource for layouts.  I've put together both a head-to-head layout (http://bieneman.org/arcade/End layout.png) and a side-by-side layout (http://bieneman.org/arcade/Front layout.png), which you're welcome to have a look at in those links (they're full-size, 100 dpi images).  But in spite of all the work to be done, it's definitely headed in the right direction!  Any questions, comments, etc., let me know!  With this being our first project, we made a few mistakes, there's a few things we would undoubtedly do differently the next time, but I think it's still coming together pretty nicely.

[talkgeek]

Looking good, looking forward to seeing it progress - all the best

[matt4949]

Lookin good. I just got done with a cocktail build. I got it 95 % done in the first 2 months and it took a year to finish that last 5 %. Mainly because I was too busy playing it to finish it. From now on the power cord will be the final step in completing a project.