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Bob's Arcade Cabinet 2nd attempt!

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BobtheAddict:
Hello everyone,

As many here have already stated, I would not be able to build a cabinet without the help of this site and it's members. I have been in the arcade scene since 2000 "Maybe longer, I can't remember" and I decided that my cabinet needs an upgrade.

The first cabinet I build in 2001 was based off a Gauntlet style cabinet I saw at a local nickle nickle arcade. I really liked how the cabinet was designed with the 4 player control panel being a big plus. My Friends and I took a stroll over to the local arcade during a lunch break and started taking measurements of the cab "Height, Depth, Width, Etc" and jotted them down on a legal pad for future reference. I know the owner of the arcade shop was tripping out because here are a bunch of guys with a legal pad and a measurement tape writting stuff down and not even dropping a single quarter to play a game. In our defense, we only had a half hour lunch so we needed to get the dimensions and head back to work.

The next couple of weeks I started researching BYOAC website examples and starting complying a list of materials, encorders, buttons and joysticks to purchase. Back in the day, everyone was using 1/2" or 3/4" particle wood "At least this is what I remembered" so that was the material I choose to build my cabinet. As for the controls, I decided to go with Happs competitor buttons with micro switches, Happ's 8 way joysticks and a Hagstrom KE72 keyboard encoder.

Here are a couple of pictures of my control panel:


I will post some additional pictures tomorrow. It's late and I feel like having a cold beer.

BobTheAddict

severdhed:
looks good...keep those pics coming.

BobtheAddict:
Last night after throwing back several cold beverages I went thru my photo album and came across some pictures of the actual cabinet itself in development. I do apologize in advance for the quality of the pictures as I had to take digital pictures of the old Kodak pictures to be able to upload them here.

As you can see from the pictures, I decided to paint the cabinet with a textured paint that was conveniently located at my local Home Depot. If I remember correctly, i must have went thru 12 cans of paint "$3.99 a pop". Oh, those were the days.

For the video portion, I had an old TV laying around and decided to hook it up with my old school 486 dell computer via RCA cables. At the time is was pretty because we could watch TV in the garage or bust out a Robotron tournament.

I will post some additional pictures of my new control panel shortly.

BobtheAddict:
Sorry guys, I travel most of the year so it is hard to keep on top of this. So let's get down to business shall we?

After building my first cabinet, I decided the control panel needed some extra elbow room between player 1 and play 2. I have look at 1000 control panel examples build by other members and nothing really stood out that I wanted to build. I enjoy the Frankenstein panels, but it not my cup of tee.  So, I decided to pick and choose some really cool features others members have utilized in their control panel.

Before doing any cutting, I started off with a cardboard box "As most everyone does" to tweak out the layout. After several tries, I finally decided on a layout. I took the design and laid it out on a piece of birch, cut it to length, drilled the holes and routed the trackball and joystick mounts.

Man, it come out like crap! It is very difficult to cut birch and not have the wood splinter. Oh well, at least I didn't spend any money on the wood.  Here is a couple of pictures that show the template I used.

After reading so many post about what type of wood to use, I came to the conclusion that MDF was the winner.  So, I went down to my local Home Depot and pick up a 4'x8' of MDF.

BobtheAddict:
Here is an update on my Arcade project. Since I built the control panel out of Birch and it came out like crap, I decided to use it as a template for the new top made from 3/4 MDF.

I took a piece of MDF and cut to size and laid the Birch template on top. All I needed to do now is to bust out my router with a flush bit and route out the template.  Here are a couple of pictures.

BobTheAddict

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