INTRO + RECEIVING KIT:
A month ago, me and a friend from work decided to build a pair of cabinets. We're currently about 80% done (and only 80% left to go)
It's our first cabinet and the goal was to make it professional looking, cover classic games, and keep within a moderate time/money budget.
For my cabinet, I'm attempting a few embelishments that I'll try to highlight in the upcoming messages: master power switch, two headphone jacks, and volume control.
We considered building from scratch, but backed down and bought the Mameroom kits. The main reason is because of the time factor to BYO, but we were also concerned that painting MDF wouldn't look as nice as laminate, and the only laminate we could find was $50/sheet countertop laminate.
We were extremely happy with the mameroom kits -- it was probably the best decision of the project. The quality of the cuts and instructions were perfect. All the holes and edges line up perfectly, and the best part is with two people working, we had TWO cabinets fully assembled in one day (actually about 8 hrs of work split over two days).
There were problems with the kit that I'll outline below, but due to the complexity of the design and shipping, I'm surprised that the problems were so minor...
- A few screws and fasteners were missing
- The keyboard tray drawer slides had the wrong parts
- About 5 boards got crunched in the corner during shipping (see last picture).
- There were a couple holes drilled in the wrong place
- The T-molding groove was maybe 1/16 - 1/32 off center.
The mameroom guy was very cooperative, mailing replacement hardware immediately at no cost. I do think the package handling should be considered a problem, but hopefully the mameroom guys will keep an eye on this issue. Although it sounds serious, I think the chances are in your favor that if there are a few crunched corners, that it won't impact the sturdiness or appearance, which was definately the case for us. The wrong holes were interior and easily spotted, so it wasn't a problem, and the T-molding centering just caused the strip to stick out a few hairs on one side which isn't a big deal.
I'll talk more about working with the laminated MDF provided by mameroom in subsequent followups, but for now, I want to mention that if you plan to cut your own control panel from their material (as we did), I recommend buying or asking them to throw in an extra sample piece so you can practice your tools on it before cutting the final product.
Below are some pictures of receiving the mameroom kits. more to come...
Jason