javeryh's Woodgrain Cabaret Copy

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javeryh:
OK here goes - figuring out the panel where the dynamic marquee will go has been by far the trickiest part so far due to space constraints in the inside of the cabinet and wanting to maintain a certain look on the outside of the cabinet.

I decided I wanted to fit both the monitor and the speakers on the inside of this panel so I started playing with the design. I used some regular paper to cut out the shapes for the monitor and the speakers. This is what it would look like with just the monitor:

I like this look. It's very clean and simple, which is something I am going for with this cabinet's overall design. However, there is nowhere else to put the speakers I could think of with my limited brainpower so I decided I needed to incorporate them here somehow.

So for my next try I placed square shapes in the bottom corners the exact size of the speakers I plan on using (Amazon Basics).

This looked... OK. I wasn't thrilled but at least it looked uniform and when I pictured a black laminated panel with the bright marquee and black speaker cloth covering the speaker cutouts it started to look better in my head. But I wanted to play with it more before committing to the design so I altered the look of the speaker cutouts and found a design I liked.

Everything now looks like it "matches" (similar rectangular shapes for all cutouts) and I was able to maintain a uniform border around all the edges of all 3 cutouts - this last point was very important to me for proportionality. I think this works.

If you look close, you can see where I actually have to cut - the red rectangle is the monitor cutout and the blue rectangles are the speaker cutouts. You can see that quite a lot of material will be removed when it is all said and done (which makes me worry about structural integrity). This design will require covering approximately the bottom 1/3 of each speaker, but I don't think that will matter as long as some sound can escape. Most of the games I'll be playing on this thing aren't that sophisticated - I probably won't even include a subwoofer.

I wanted to show my thought process here because it took me a while to get here even though the results are completely boring. I had to think about it over the course of a few days before I finally arrived at a design I liked through iterating on the main idea. I'm hoping this might encourage people to try different things and not get tunnel vision with the first thing you think of or even worse to just start cutting material without putting in some real thought.

Next up is cutting this thing. :cheers:

wp34:

--- Quote from: javeryh on February 26, 2020, 11:41:56 am ---
--- Quote from: wp34 on February 26, 2020, 11:35:23 am ---This is the most ridiculous arc I ever routed. It was as stupid as it was fun.
--- End quote ---

Haha that is awesome. I take it you are like me in that you don't trust your own eyes when it comes to cutting to a line. I watch a lot of woodworking videos on YouTube and I'm always amazed at how they can cut close to a line and then just "clean it up" at the disc sander or whatever and it looks perfect - smooth curve or straight line - they just eyeball it. If I can build a jig to make something precise - that's what I'm going to do.

--- End quote ---

Yeah I'm exactly that way. Do not trust my own eyes. I also like to mock things up exactly like you did in the post above this. :cheers:

javeryh:
Now that I decided on the proportions, it was time to cut out the panel. This was very difficult (for me at least). First, I used a drill in the corners of the areas I wanted to cut out to make pilot holes for my jigsaw blade. Next, I rough cut everything with the jigsaw. The last step was cleaning up all of the cuts with a router and straight edge. Easier said than done because of all the weird clamping I had to do for each cutout in order to set up the router so it had a flat surface to run along but still cut away the material.

This is how it looked after the router step. In order to get the monitor to fit, I used a flush cut hand saw on the corners to remove the material that the router could not reach.

Perfect fit for the monitor! I decased it as you can see from the picture.

The last bit of woodworking I had to do on this panel was cut out the 2 holes for the speakers. I repeated the drill/jigsaw/router process and when I was done the speaker grills fit perfectly.

If you look close, you can see the round area behind the speaker grills - the actual speakers just screw in place in the 4 holes. The only thing I need to work out is how to get everything to stay in place. I could build some supports from behind but honestly I think some hot glue around the edge of the speaker grill where you won't see it from the front will do the trick.

One concern I have is that I removed a lot of material from the MDF panel... hopefully not too much. The laminate on the front side and the monitor mount should add some rigidity to the entire thing but I won't know until I actually finish... I came up with a few ideas on how to solve this problem and Arroyo gave me some advice and the light bulb went off. I'll post that process next.

:cheers:

wp34:
That turned out real nice. Everything looks like it fits in real tight.

--- Quote from: javeryh on February 27, 2020, 10:40:31 am ---One concern I have is that I removed a lot of material from the MDF panel... hopefully not too much. The laminate on the front side and the monitor mount should add some rigidity to the entire thing but I won't know until I actually finish... I came up with a few ideas on how to solve this problem and Arroyo gave me some advice and the light bulb went off. I'll post that process next.
:cheers:

--- End quote ---

That was my first thought when I saw the pictures. Looking forward to seeing how you solved it.

leapinlew:
Looking good!

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