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EX's Kitchen Cab (so has to match the kitchen!)
Franco B:
Awesomeness :) 8)
I wasnt sure how well the marquee was going to work when you posted the first image but it looks really good on the cab, the colours deff are different. I suppose thats why you have to be so careful when getting things printed.
Looking forward to your next update ;)
ex_directory:
Speakers
I bought a set of Creative Labs Dimension 2800 speakers a while back. It's a 2.1 speaker set which is good as I wanted the bass for Defender but the small satellites was also going to be better to work with.
Originally got both the light and speakers ideas from an site called The Story of a Cabinet Built in 24 Hours that has been around for a long time now.
Idea being to use the mini mouse (volume, bass control) on the outside of the cab.
On the back of the speaker panel I routed out the area for the speaker and removed the grill and stand so I could get a nice tight fit. The front is curved so this seemed to be the best way to keep it in place.
Next I bent an aluminium strip around the speakers to hold them down. Here is a pic of the two sats from behind.
On the fronts I wanted an authentic cab look, I cut a circular hole and 4 holes for some domed hex bolts. My father in law got some bezels made up for me and we also managed to source a sheet of metal grill. The bezels are made of aluminium so are not shiny. In fact we lightly grinded them to give them a brushed look.
And the two together.
I am very pleased with the results, came out as I had imagined :)
For the volume control decided to put this on the back at the top, not being confident at hacking I simply removed the top, put a longer thread in and mounted the mouse underneath the panel and the volume knob on top. This means I have no access to the bass control, but since I have always prefer to hear sound the way it was intended I left it in the neutral setting.
Am still in two minds to spray the volume control silver but you don't really see it from the kitchen. Next to the volume is the switch for the light. Reminder: Need to add a blank in to the second hole! It might just niggle me knowing I have some black left on the cab so it may have to be done :-\
This will control the speaker volume in the cab but I also plan to use my spinner to control the windows volume. I have seen some posts on the forum about this and I believe someone kindly wrote a tool to help to do this (when it's all hooked up of course) :cheers:
I have a set of in-wall Speakercraft speakers which push out some really nice sound 8) One can be seen a couple of posts ago above the marquee. These are hooked up to my main amp in the lounge (Denon 2803 with multi-zone - great amp). So I wanted to have the PC also output sound to my main amp. Fortunately, the lounge and amp are just behind a wall to the left of the cab. So got myself some decent interconnect cable, channelled it through the wall and soldered on to one of these below which gave me a point in the kitchen to output sound too. To get something similar on the cab, i got some leviton snap in stuff (US product but sold by Lets Automate! in the UK)
Using the three socket housing and a bit of patient routing/chiseling was able to make a nice fit for this in the back of the cab. I used left/right phono straight through connectors and a network mod. Add this to the power socket already added and a vent and the back of my cab now looks like this.
With the remaining interconnect cable I made up a 1m interconnect to go from the cab to the wall. Got all my interconnect stuff from CPC and there is a good article about making your own cables up over on this forum.
Next problem which I am still not sure if I have solved as I have not connected it up yet is that I wanted to have my PC output to both cab speaker and my phono sockets on the back of the cab at the same time. That way if I had my zone 2 (Kitchen) on my amp switched on and or my cab speakers on I would get sound from those speakers without any extra configuration in XP.
For this I got a second hand Creative card (Audigy ZS) which after asking on AVS Forum does seem to output to both coaxial and analogue ports on the card at the same time. So my 2.1 speaker will be connected via the electrical (coaxial) connection and my amp via the 3.5mm analogue jack.
The alternative is using two sound cards, but most software including Mame I believe does not allow you to specify which device to playback sound on. Again there is a tool out there to switch the default device (which is the one apps will use when they startup until they shutdown) just before starting up an app which could do the same thing but I will probably just disable my on-board sound anyway. It will not be as good quality as my new card.
The up side is i just turn my amp/cab speakers on/off to listen to them. The only down side I can see is that you might want the jukebox playing sounds to the kitchen speakers while having Mame sounds routed to the cab, I don't see this as likely though in my case.
"Speakers, done!", well almost when they are hooked up and assuming the Audigy does work ;)
ex_directory:
Coin Door
I bought a coin door off ebay a while back. I wanted the old door as I remembered it as opposed to a new one, two slots, 10p coin rejector slot on a single panel. I found one but it was a bit beaten up, very grimey, ash stubbed out on it etc. Unfortunately I have no before pictures.
It was also missing some parts but swallow amusements was able to help me out there.
As I am avoiding black (apart from the monitor when it is off of course) on the cab, i took all the paint off the frame and coin reject flips. The outer edge did not look great, beaten up mild steel and was very dull so sprayed this using plasti-kote chrome spray from B&Q. Came up nice but at the moment any nick on it and it takes the spray paint away so I need to laquer it in some way to harden it off.
The rest of the coin door came up nice with some careful cleaning using a soft wire pad sanding in the direction of the existing brushed grain.
I got a new lock as the original was rusty and came with no key. I also had a coin box made to hook over the back of the frame. Will have to post a picture of that later.
Here are some pics of the door fitted in to the cab.
Up close (click here for a close up)
Further away
And the bottom half (with chrome t-molding in place).
As you can see from the above pic, I have tried to hide the red rejector buttons, they look great in the coin door but damn awful on my cab. What I need are some new faceplates making up but this is lower priority for now.
To remove the red for now I have printed up some overlays for the rejector and stuck it on with sticky back plastic then cut a whole for the coin slot. It does not look great but does do the job.
Here is the pic of the artwork I made.
When I got the door, it was marked as 10p and 20p slots. However, they were actually accepting 20p and 20p token. I have got the 20p token to accept a 20p every time but the 20p normal Is working maybe 1 in 3 so I think I need to tweak the magnets.
Will post some behind the scenes pics next time.
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