Thanks! The forum seems to have unanimous consensus with Nigel Tufnel - "It's like, how much more black could this be, and the answer is none. None more black."
I'll take it under advisement. It seems like the right answer to me so far.
I've been doing some work on the cockpit coin door. It looks like this:
But now, if you open the coin return door under the coin up button, you'll find a secret:
USB port for administrative convenience, since the computer is pretty well buried. The doors on these coin doors don't open very far, so the port is angled such that a thumb drive will fit in.
To make that work inside, I built a fairly tricky aluminum bracket, and epoxied a dashboard mount USB cable into it.
It picks up the lower mounting screws that I think the coin mechs originally did. I ziptied the cable up above as a strain relief - seemed wise, given it's going to be moving relative to the PC when the cabinet changes modes.
I'm also wrapping up construction on the big control panel slider, by building a shelf for the wireless keyboard to be stored in.
The exterior cuts are simple enough to bandsaw, and a forstner bit gives me big holes to start a jigsaw/saber saw in. I clamped it down to my workbench to do each end.
I wanted to share a trick I used for this.
Most people here, I think, would treat a jigsaw like an unreliable roughing tool that they couldn't trust near the final line - they'd leave a quarter inch or so, then make a template, clamp it on, and use a router to clean up the hole.
This makes sense to me - if you try to trace the hole precisely, while cutting along the lines, any side-loading of the jigsaw blade can cause it to flex and knock your cut out of square.
But here's a trick that might be of use if you've never tried it: The jigsaw blade is only really flexible side to side. It's quite stiff in the fore-aft axis, it's not going to bend out of square in that direction. If you've roughed out the center of the hole the way you normally would, try approaching your final line from 90' perpendicular and then carefully crosscutting with the teeth of the saw - you can use it like a power file to erase down to your line with confidence that the leading edge of the teeth will be cutting square to the surface.
This is my roughed out hole, using only a jigsaw, before sanding:
It's not perfect, but I consider that to be within easy reach of a sanding block to a nice line, and I never had to mess with templating - just freehand erasing wood with the sides of the teeth up to the marked pencil line.
This piece gets glued into a few others and forms the back of this shelf under the VR buttons, matching that hoop you saw in the bulkhead earlier:
The keyboard seen below fits in here, out of sight and out of the way but accessible when needed.
The lead weights I'm clamping the glue joints with are going to be the TV playfield counterweights to balance it out on the axle. You'll be seeing more of them much later. You can also see that I've radiused the sharp corners of the VR button group, because that's somewhat possible to clip with your knee while getting in or out.
I've currently got a bunch of filler curing on the control panel. Very soon, it shall be bodywork sanding time.