Cabinet Build for the Non-Cabinet Builder

[uberkirby]

This is my introduction, inaugural post, and project announcement all in one.

Hi all.

I've been lurking for about 15 years and attempted my first cabinet build based on Lucid's famous example in 2003.  It was cool, but it was massive, definitely not wife friendly, and to be honest, I immediately wished I had done a tonne of things differently.  A lot changes between 28 and 39, so here we are for round 2.

A bit about myself and my approach:  I've been in IT for about 20 years, so the tech portion of a cabinet build doesn't phase me in the slightest.  I also grew up on a farm, so i have a fairly pragmatic approach to most things and have cultivated a reasonable ability to figure out workarounds to problems.  Living on a farm 30 minutes from the nearest town and 3 hours to the nearest city means you can't just pop into the home Depot every time you need something.  You have to adapt and overcome, so to speak.

Having said that, my time isn't worthless, so if I have the opportunity to throw money at a problem and solve it in 10 minutes for $50, I'm certainly not going to spend 2 hours trying to fix it for "free".  I have an hourly rate in my mind for what my time is worth, and that tells me how much time I can spend on something before it makes sense to spend money.  You'll see that thinking sprinkled throughout my build.

Another part of my approach is that, for me, it isn't about "the craft" and it isn't about "the journey".  It's about the end result.  Period.  I want something that is reliable (plays the game I want all the time, everytime), looks good (I want the"WOW YOU BUILT THIS?" reaction) and that's about it.  Those are my project requirements that I need to accomplish.  Whether we get there with a billion wood screws and a tonne of wood filler, or masterful joinery and 1/64" accuracy, I don't care.  Not a project requirement as long as those 2 points are met.

That leads to my next point of focusing my build thread on a very specific portion of the potential arcade building community:  The people who want to try their hand at building a cabinet but have been completely intimidated by the amazing builds that they see here.  They see an amaza-crazy build and it just add's another check into the "Things I want to do, but probably can't" column. 

You see, when you read the build threads, there are some tremendously talented people doing amazing work.  You read the thread and it's perfection from start to finish.  That's awesome if you can do it, but what about the rest of us?  I want a cabinet, but I'm no carpenter and can't do work like they do.  I also don't want to spend $4000 on a pre-made cabinet, so what am I left with?  Power through and do it, son.

So to try and help people get out to the garage and start working, I'm not going to bother hiding my mistakes in any of the pictures, and I'm probably going to specifically point them out to show how many I make and how easy they are to fix.  I'm going to scream the awesomeness of wood filler from the mountain tops and hopefully show that you can build a nice arcade cabinet with mediocre skills.

Maybe I'm being a bit presumptuous to think that I can inspire anyone, but suck it, at least I'm presumptuous and helpful 




Unless I lose interest and decide to spend my money on hookers and blackjack instead....

[yotsuya]

As long as it plays Galaga, my friend. 

[uberkirby]

Let's get this party started

The Design

If I'm going to spend my limited spare time on something I want to make sure that I'll be happy with the end result.  That means a design inspired by, or completely ripped off from, a known good result.

I don't think I could come up with anything better than Ond's cabinet design, and I've seen a few finished examples and know that it looks great when finished

Here's Onds thread http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php?topic=118612.0



One thing to be aware of for anyone starting out on this build, is that despite the initial premise of the build, this isn't absolutely not an instruction manual.  There are missing dimensions on the drawings, the plans are in 1/32" so you have to round off and convert yourself, and there is no finished cabinet art or templates to download like what was initially discussed.  Ond has come closer than anyone else I have ever seen to creating a start to finish build manual, but don't expect something completely polished.

THIS IS NOT A SLAM ON OND!!!!!!  He has done more , for free, to move us towards a complete build manual than anyone else I have ever seen, and deserves all the credit and recognition that goes with this.  I'm just pointing out that you will definitely have to ad-lib a few things as you go, which may be intimidating for some people.

Some notes for the intimidated:

• Use Ond's design.  it looks amazing
• If you like this or any other design, don't be afraid to draw inspiration from it, or totally copy it - Ignore the comments suggesting that you need to come up with your own unique design in order to have a "real cabinet".  You are the only one that has to be happy with it.  Besides, there are a billion Donkey Kong replica builds out there.  Are those somehow not real cabinets because they're the same?  Pick something you like and then build it.
• Don't be afraid of the missing information.  I'll hopefully show you how I worked around it and how easy it was.  Besides, there's always wood filler.
• Half @ssing things is different than not being accomplished at something.  If you just blast through without caring, your cabinet will suck.  If you do your absolute best and take as much time as you need to measure things, think about things, and finally cut and assemble things, you will get a good result.  You might not be a master cabinet builder, but that's no excuse to half-@ss your build.

[reptileink]

Great first post, look forward to your build. 

While I am fairly handy with a hammer and saw, finesse work is not my strong suit. I would rather make a square coffin box than have to duplicate two exact sides...lol. Also, I lack some of the fancy tools used here by the big guns, so that will help too.

[uberkirby]

I've already screwed up...

I was planning on telling everyone that my build was inspired by this cabinet but got caught up in the moment and forgot:



I thought it would make some of you horrified and some others chuckle.

That build actually was an inspiration for my desire to help some of the intimidated get out there and build.  The build got me thinking about how that cabinet sucks, but he likes it and at least he built something.  But holy hell does it suck.  But he's the only one who has to  like it.  But it sucks.  But he likes it and built something, but it sucks....

Feedback loop.

[uberkirby]

Great first post, look forward to your build. 

While I am fairly handy with a hammer and saw, finesse work is not my strong suit. I would rather make a square coffin box than have to duplicate two exact sides...lol. Also, I lack some of the fancy tools used here by the big guns, so that will help too.

Thanks.  I watched your build as well.  Big Punisher fan from way back when he teamed up with Spiderman against Moses Malone (or some other name like that).

I'm with you on the finesse thing.  I once used an axe to chop open the trunk of a crappy car I had after I locked the keys in it there.  I didn't want to wait for CAA to show up.  That's what I'm fighting every time I need to spend a lot of time on finesse work.

but I keep telling myself "Take the time.  Do it right.  You only have to to do it once.  it's not like I'm on an assembly line and have to do this over and over again."

[uberkirby]

As long as it plays Galaga, my friend. 

Just the Greek version - Malaka


See what I did there? 

[Slippyblade]

Half @ssing things is different than not being accomplished at something.  If you just blast through without caring, your cabinet will suck.  If you do your absolute best and take as much time as you need to measure things, think about things, and finally cut and assemble things, you will get a good result.  You might not be a master cabinet builder, but that's no excuse to half-@ss your build.

Sage words from the newb! 

[uberkirby]

Next Up - Control Panel Design

I've seen a lot of discussion and stress about control panel design.  Specifically with button placement.  I know I want a 2 player panel as the number of times I'll have more than that playing will be waaaaay fewer than the amount of times my wife will ask me why I built that giant piece of crap.

I also figure that this probably won't be my last build.  If I want to play 4 player games, I'll just plug the control panel and monitor of my second cabinet into the first cabinet.  Pow.  Instant 4 players spread out over 2 cabinets.  That took away any stress I felt about not having enough space for players.  Even if the cabinets aren't in the same room, my house is wired with Cat6 network cable.  I can just use an HDMI over ethernet and a USB over Ethernet extender and solve the problem.
 
I also want to keep the number of buttons to a minimum.  Easy as possible for people to play and figure out.  I've landed on 7 RGB LED buttons per player, 1 and 2 player start, exit and pause.  I think I can do everything else from combinations.  I might hide a shift button on the top of my cabinet, but I'll cross that bridge when it comes.
The RGB LED is important because it will light up what buttons to be used for each game or system.  I would imagine "dead" buttons would cause a lot of confusion to people.  Having the correct ones lit up would probably take care of that.

 When I was trying to figure out the button layout I went around in circles from traditional and non-traditional.  Again, trying to keep withthe theme of easy, I thought that 2 evenly spaced rows of 3 or 4 would be better.  then it struck me that most of the people who will play this thing haven't been to an arcade in 20 years.  It's not like there's a lot of muscle memory to be retained, its there?

So wit htat freeing thoguht, I set out to find the perfect ergonomic button placement.  Here's how I did it:

I took a scrap piece of paper and then wet my fingers under the kitchen faucet.  I laid the paper down at the right height on my kitchen counter and proceeded to madly "button mash" my wet fingers on the piece of paper.



The result was the exact places where my fingers naturally fell.  I circled those with a black sharpie

Then I pulled up the button layouts from slagcoin.com held up my piece of paper to the monitor and scrolled down the list until I found something that lined up with the black dots.




Voila.  A near perfect match with the Sega style button layout (ecept for my pinky).  I have giant steam shovel hands, so I'll probably just stick to the layouts on slagcoin.  Easier to measure and drill and a good compromise between what I want and the correct size for regular people hands.

[uberkirby]

Next Up - Tools:

I actually cheated on this build.  I have a lot of the cuts done already.  But I can now post with the benefit of hindsight in some cases.

For my first build in 2003 I bought a cheap router (Mastercraft plunge router), a jigsaw, and a Ryobi table saw.  The table saw was ridiculously difficult to muscle around entire sheets of MDF by myself while getting an even cut and not killing myself.  I would recommend not doing it that way. 
I also tried getting the cuts done at the place I bought the lumber from.  That was also a hassle as the guy doing the cutting treated it like he was doing you a favour and they only claimed that they would be accurate to 1/8".  Scratch that.


So for this build, I thought I would use my circular saw with a straight edge to cut one side of the cabinet and then use a pattern trace bit in my router to do the second side.  The rest of the cuts are just squares and rectangles and are easier to do.

I found the straight edge with with the circular saw works well enough, but there's a lot of time spending on measuring.  You have to measure the line you want to cut and then add on the dimension of the fence/table/guard/whatever it's called on the circular saw.  i don't do this for a living and a lot of mistakes were made simply due to math and the addition of fractions.

To help me with that, I bought a drywall t square which has become one of my most used measuring tools.



I measure the line that I want to cut and then use the T square to make the line all the way across the MDF sheet.  Then I place the circular saw blade exactly on the mark I just made.  With the saw in place, I slide the T square right against he saw and clamp it down.  It's instantly square, the saw is in the correct location, and I have a guiding pencil line to double check my line as I make the cut.  Using the T square as a fence, I ran the saw down the MDF and got a pretty reasonable cut.

With that combo, the cuts are a lot less stressful and I started knocking out some pretty accurate stuff.  Accurate for me that is.  A lot of the cuts are still between 1/16th and 1/8th out.  for some cuts, that's a big deal.  Specifically the ones that need to square up with another edge.  For others like the panel sides, it doesn't matter in the least as we're just going to trace it using the router.  The router doesn't care if things are out of square, it just transfers the pattern to the other side.  If the side you're tracing looks good, the second side will look good.  But garbage in, garbage out so take your time and get the first one right.



Part way through the build, my router blew apart.  I did some reading to try to figure out what a good replacement would be and found out how dangerous these things are when not used correctly.  And I was certainly not using it correctly.  Check out this thread as a cautionary tale.  The dude cut his finger off with a router in a split second.  That's bonkers.

http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php/topic,52708.0.html

I ended up getting desperate and buying a Black and Decker router.  Had it lose power and stutter its way along the boards.  Not good.  I can fix it with sanding , but still not ideal. 
Returned it and got a Ridgid.  Waaaaay better.  More power and smoother cuts.  But then I had a moment of weakness and bought a Dewalt router...because...it...fit...with...the ...Dewalt track saw that I also bought.  Keep in mind that this was when I was pretty much done all of my cuts, so buying thousands of dollars of tools is certainly not required for your build.  In fact, the only reason I mention it is for my next point about an awesome alternative to heading down that path.

Using a tracksaw was a dream.  Even though I had finished most of my cuts, I used it on a few and there was so little measuring with such an EASY high quality result, that I immediately started daydreaming about my next cabinet.  It requires no measuring, just lay the edge on your pencil line and cut.  Easy. But that got me thinking that I could build a guide for my Circular saw to do almost the same thing.  Or at least to keep the basic idea of "clamp it  where you want to cut" which I found to be the biggest benefit.

Sure enough, lots of people have already figured this out and they call it a sawboard. There's even a super convoluted, 27,00 post sticky about it in the woodworking section of this forum.  For simplicity sake, I'll save you 90 minutes of reading and scratching your head and point you to this:

http://www.popularmechanics.com/home/tools/reviews/a3602/4283497/

Picture of a sawboard is here (not mine):



For newbies like me, I absolutely positively 100% recommend you build one of these.  It makes everything so simple and takes about 20 minutes to put together.  If you are one of the guys in the circular saw only club, and are reading this saying "That doesn't seem like it would help" , stop and look at it some more.  You are missing something.  It's awesome and it will make your circular saw cutting better and faster.  No, it's not the wooden equivalent of an aluminum straight edge like you are thinking.  It's the home made equivalent of a $650 track saw.

Also, if something about it doesn't make sense, just take a stab at building a half assed one.  In 20 minutes, it will make sense and then you'll be able to build a proper one based on the lengths that you need, your clamp sizes, and circular saw.  All that you've lost is a little bit of time and some scrap lumber before getting something awesome that will help you every step of the way.

To paraphrase my version of the instructions:

1) Cut a long 3/4" MDF base 4 or 5 inches wider than the base of your circular saw - The length of this board will be the maximum length that you can cut in one pass, so 8' wouldn't be out of line.

2) Cut another long piece of MDF the same length as the base but it only needs to be 2 or 3 inches wide.  The only thing to note here is to make sure there is one long edge that has never been cut before.  As in, it's the same as when you brought it home from the store.  That's because this will be your straight edge that you will run your saw against, so one edge needs to be as straight as possible.  The other edge...we do not care how straight it is in the slightest.

3) Screw/glue the guide piece into the base piece with the worst edge of your guide lined up with one of the edges of your base.

4) Put your circular saw against the wood fence (on the nice straight edge I mentioned above) and run a cut all the way down.  This cuts the base to the exact  dimension of your saw and blade.  Zero clearance.

5) Ignore any instructions or videos that have you stressing about measuring the perfect dimension and squareness of the base and fence.  Your first cut takes care of all of that and makes the base square to the fence.  It's easy.  I promise.


There are lots of enhancements or modifications that others will suggest (and some really good ideas in there) but for the purpose of this post, you have what you need,  From this point on, all you have to do when you want to make a cut is to draw your line and then lay the edge of the sawboard on that line and cut away.  You know exactly where the saw blade will be without any additional measuring or math.


You can easily get away with building your cabinet with a sawboard, circular saw, a router, and some clamps.  Throw in a T square and a tape measure, and I think you've got what you need.

If you have any inside corners you need rounded, you might need a jigsaw, but I barely used mine - Just one inside corner on the panel sides.  If you want to get really luxurious, a palm sander makes smoothing things out quick and easy, but you can do the same thing with sanding blocks and time.


So there we go.  My complete A-Z of the tools I used and an explanation of the tools I think you need.

[Brouhaha]

Awesome initial posts 

I'm a "non-cabinet builder"/software developper myself and am really enjoying my project. The results are above expectations so far... In fact, my wife has already ordered some furniture in the near future. Kinda good on the ego 

Again, this is sure to be a cool read. Subscribed! 

[uberkirby]

Awesome initial posts 

I'm a "non-cabinet builder"/software developper myself and am really enjoying my project. The results are above expectations so far... In fact, my wife has already ordered some furniture in the near future. Kinda good on the ego 

Again, this is sure to be a cool read. Subscribed! 

A fellow IT nerd   After sitting in meetings and/or behind a desk all day, it's good to do something tactile, isn't it?  And hopefully we have a head start over the other dudes when it comes to the technology aspects of the cabinet. 

Just have to figure out those pesky measurements.  What sociopath decided measuring things in 16ths of an inch was a solid way of doing things, anyway

And congrats on cracking the wife nut.  My wife has progressed from "That thing is not coming into the house" to "Maybe in the basement".  That's the equivalent of slam dunking a basketball while doing a back flip while firing an uzi.  So you know...pretty standard stuff.

[yotsuya]

You're my new 2nd favorite Canadian here.

[Vidiot]

I really like your approach to this project; not hiding your mistakes and trying to offer advice and share what you've learned from your experience. I definitely know what you mean about being intimidated by the awesome builds on this forum. Your artwork is way cool and I love your attitude. Looking forward to following your build. 

[danny_galaga]

I'm pretty ordinary at woodwork. Bondo is your friend 

[uberkirby]

You're my new 2nd favorite Canadian here.

I commit to rising to your #1 by introducing ridiculous Canadian crap to you. Oh and maybe building a cool cabinet.  But mostly the first one

I give you Canadian Gangsta Rap

[yotsuya]

You're my new 2nd favorite Canadian here.

I commit to rising to your #1 by introducing ridiculous Canadian crap to you. Oh and maybe building a cool cabinet.  But mostly the first one

I give you Canadian Gangsta Rap

If that's "Informer" by Snow I'm gonna kick your ass.

Opt2Not is Canadian Homie #1.

[uberkirby]

I really like your approach to this project; not hiding your mistakes and trying to offer advice and share what you've learned from your experience. I definitely know what you mean about being intimidated by the awesome builds on this forum. Your artwork is way cool and I love your attitude. Looking forward to following your build. 

Thanks.  Hopefully I can show that most mistakes can be fixed easily and are not a valid reason to not start your build.  Maybe ease the intimidation factor a bit.

We'll see i guess.

Oh, and that artwork is from Ond's original design.  Mine will be different.  More on that later.

[uberkirby]

I'm pretty ordinary at woodwork. Bondo is your friend 

Agreed I think.  At least on the ability to fill even large gaps.

Iv'e only used Bondo on auto body stuff.  I've used wood filler on my previous cabinet quite a bit though. 

Thoughts or comments on the difference?  I haven't gotten to the fill stage yet, so there's still time if I'm using the wrong product.

[uberkirby]

More build stuff.  Less stupid jokes.

Controls

I've settled on 7-8 buttons per person.  I can play pretty much every Mame game I would ever want, and I can play most emulators with that number.  LED buttons make things easier for people to follow so that's a must.  Concave not convex .  They feel better to me.  So that's 14-16 player buttons, 2 for 1 and 2 player start, and 2 for admin functions.

Not going with a Trackball on this build.  I think the space for wild Golden Tee swinging action on my control panel is too small.  I foresee a smashed glass bezel, but I reserve the right to rethink this one.

No spinner.  I've never played a spinner game in my life so maybe I don't know what I'm missing, but I also don't care.

For the joystick, I spent a bunch of time thinking about it and decided on the Ultimate 360 with the long shaft (that's what she said), hard springs, and the top plate for adjusting 4way/8 way/analog.  I used some Happ competition joysticks a long time ago which were nice, but there's no easy switching to 4 way.  The Servostick was in the running, but the analog option on the U360 sold me.

On a related note, what is the deal with arcade control suppliers websites looking like they were built on Geocities in 1998?  I've done a fair amount of ecommerce for other hobby businesses and the tools available to people to make legit websites now are insane.  No reason to have ghetto looking web pages and definitely no reason for missing or hard to find information.  That's pretty much across the board, BTW. 
Here's an example.  Go to the Ultimarc page and look for info on their Classic LED buttons.  The words "classic" "button" "RGB" don't show up anywhere on the main page.  They aren't listed under the Controls section.  And there's no search feature.  I found the info by going to the Ultimarc web site, going to the web store, looking thorugh the massive list to find the LED buttons, and then clicking the "More Info" which took me back to some unknown section of the main page.  Not intuitive.
I'm grateful that these places exist to service the community and Andy seems to be a solid dude, but I'm also thoroughly unimpressed with the user friendliness of his and pretty much other suppliers web site.

Anyway, back to the joysticks.  I chose the Ultimate 360's because of the super fast adjustment for 4/8/analog.  Just a little plastic piece that you switch around.  Takes seconds.  That should allow me to play some N64 games that are on my list using the analog and maybe even some modern PC games as well.  They cost more, but the difference of 30 or 40 bucks a joystick is minuscule compared to what I get which is to not be limited by my hardware.

So Ultimarc joysticks, and Ultimarc RGB buttons are available...gee...what am I going to pick for my controller?

I used an old IPAC on my first build and it worked pretty well.  I looked at the Howler that's apparently built by a dude here in my city, but there doesn't seem to be as much support for it and fewer people using it.  Being in IT, I know that the intiial cost is a fraction of the total cost of ownership.  Cost to support something can sometimes exceeds the intial investment.  Since one of my project goals was to have this be ultra reliable, I crossed the Howler off my list.

That moved me back to Ultimarc and the IPAC Ultimate I/O controller.  It has enough inputs for all my stuff and it comes with pre-crimped wires for plugging in joysticks, spinners, LED's, track balls.  That alone is worth the cost of admission as crimping wires is not awesome.  Some people spend the extra time to make custom wires with custom lengths and custom colours.  That's not what I'm doing here.  I don't want things to be messy.  Definitely want things neat and tidy so it's easy to troubleshoot, but I get nothing out of having a super duper down to the 1/32nd wiring job.  Does it add to my project goals of reliability and awesome looks?  Nope.  So going with the wiring kit that comes with the Ultimate checks off all the boxes and saves me time.  Perfect.

I'm going to do a coin door as well.  I've looked at the cheapo ones that some places are selling and they just don't look right to me.  I think I'm just straight up going with Happ on this one.  The other thing is that I want to use custom tokens with mine.  i have some 3 yo, 5yo, and 7yo nephews and I've seen them going bonkers plugging quarters into every candy, penny flattener, and garbage trinket machine they've ever seen.  My Brother-in-law once said that they didn't actually need to go on their holiday to Italy.  Just give them each $20 worth of quarters and turn them loose on a gumball machine.

So by having my tokens instead of a coin add button, I think that will capture some of that fun for them and some nostalgia for us older dudes.


So here's the shopping list:

20 Classic RGB Buttons
1 Ipac Ultimate IO
2 U360 joysticks

I also threw in the joystick mounting kit since my home Depot doesn't seem to have anything like that and I wanted to try it out.

Happ coin door with token mec will also be ordered directly from Happ.  Not sure what size I'm going for yet.

Ordered the Ultimarc stuff.  Pics when I get it and open it all up.

[EMDB]

...
For the joystick, I spent a bunch of time thinking about it and decided on the Ultimate 360 with the long shaft (that's what she said), hard springs, and the top plate for adjusting 4way/8 way/analog.  I used some Happ competition joysticks a long time ago which were nice, but there's no easy switching to 4 way.  The Servostick was in the running, but the analog option on the U360 sold me.
...

The U360 is not mechanical but software switchable by downloading different mapping profiles per game. Your frontend must support it but being an IT guy this should not be problem.

[uberkirby]

...
For the joystick, I spent a bunch of time thinking about it and decided on the Ultimate 360 with the long shaft (that's what she said), hard springs, and the top plate for adjusting 4way/8 way/analog.  I used some Happ competition joysticks a long time ago which were nice, but there's no easy switching to 4 way.  The Servostick was in the running, but the analog option on the U360 sold me.
...

The U360 is not mechanical but software switchable by downloading different mapping profiles per game. Your frontend must support it but being an IT guy this should not be problem.

You are correct that there is a software component to this whole deal.  I'm using Hyperspin and LEDblinky. 

In my description I was talking more about the restrictor plates that provide the proper feel.  This thing:

[johnrt]

Unless I lose interest and decide to spend my money on hookers and blackjack instead....

Wait... what? Is that an option??

[yotsuya]

Unless I lose interest and decide to spend my money on hookers and blackjack instead....

Wait... what? Is that an option??

That's always an option.

[uberkirby]

I spent about 12 hours out in the garage today.  Brace yourself for an avalanche of pictures this evening.  Loooooooots of progress, mistakes and fixes to prove my point that anyone can do this and get a good result.

I'm expecting to take a beating from a few of the super duper awesome guys about my technique and methods.  I invite it so don't hold back.  I do want to learn and get better but I don't want my lack of skill keep me from trying to build something cool.


...and I'm hoping you lurkers will come out of the woodwork (hah) to defend my sweet ass

[uberkirby]

Continuing pretending that this is already hasn't happened...

My Controls arrived !!!

Here's my U360's with the long shaft and restrictor installed.  Pretty happy with these so far.




Got the LED buttons to.  Definitely some assembly required on these.  Put the LED and the diffusers in them all.  I was pretty sure that the website said the wiring was "ready to go" .  This is definitely not ready.  Not a huge deal but something I wasn't expecting.




Here's the Ipac Ultimate.  These wires are ready to go which will save a bunch of time




Also picked up one of these.  Figure I'll install Windows on a couple of USB drives in RAID 1.  Redundancy, easy swapping if one fails, no heat, and I already have a bunch of them laying around.  I'll still need some traditional hard drives to fit Hyperspin et al, but I'll handle that a different way.




I picked up an intake and exhaust fan.  I'll put the red LED one on the front, behind the false front.  It might show a little glow in the opening below it.  Maybe not.

The plain black one will go on the upper part of the cabinet on the back.  Exhausting any hot air, and out of the reach of any tiny fingers




Also got my free samples from tmolding.com.  The red should do nicely for what I have in mind.

[uberkirby]

aaand finally, the build.

I can't find the pictures of my early cuts, but I'm going to move right on to showing some mistakes and how they look once fixed up.

Here's what happens when your router sucks and you don't now what you're doing.  30 seconds of sanding fixes that up.  My new router with the same bit hasn't had this happen, so I'm inclined to blame it on the crappy Black and Decker I used on this.




I didn't support the cut for my control panel properly and this happened.  A quick clean up cut with the tracksaw/sawboard and it will be fine


Also got the angle wrong.  Some wood filler and more sanding will level that out


and the last problem on the panel was a little bit of overhang.  Another trim will clean it up



And here it is fixed up.  Mostly.
I trimmed it up, did some sanding, and filled some of the gaps with filler.  Note the super terribad job I did of filling the nail holes.  And pay attention later to how it doesn't matter at all.  Just fill it and sand.  And if you need to fill and sand some more.  No big deal.



Got the edges on the false front routed nicely.  The Dewalt router is awesome.  The front looks cool.



Check out the massive gaps between my panels on the top.  I cut these according to the plan, but there was no mention of any angles so I cut them straight.  Look pretty bad right?



Another gap in the front



More filler



More sanding and I'm completely satisfied.  Smooth as can be.

[uberkirby]

The gap in the front is a lot bigger and I don't want the panels to be able to move and crack the wood filler in the gaps, so I dug through my junk bucket and found an angle bracket.  Put it in the vice and bent it to the right angle, then screwed it to the inside panels.  This will be hidden behind the marquee so nobody will see it.




By this time you're probably guessing at where I'm headed with most of these.  Mistake.  Wood filler.  No mistake.
Here's a few where I measured incorrectly and missed the inside firring strips or where I stripped the MDF and could get a bite with the screws.  Yup.  More filling and who cares.  Not this cowboy, I'll tell you that for free.



Here it is filled and sanded.  A couple of the holes need a bit more attention, but that's a trivial matter.



Here's my back door cut and installed.  Looks pretty reasonable, right?



How about now?  It was a tricky cut with the circular saw.  i wanted to save the inside piece to reuse as a door (different than the plan) so I had to basically plunge the saw into the panel part way through, trying to stay on the correct line.  Then finish the corners with the Jigsaw.  Yeah, the jigsaw drifted a bit. 
Not sure if I really care since this is on the back of the cabinet where nobody but me will ever see it, but if it starts to bug me, I'll probably put some trim around the entire door to cover all the gaps.

[uberkirby]

So this is pretty much where we stand at the end of today.  It looks like this, except the front panel edges and control panel edges have been routed and some of the gaps and holes have been filled. 



I'm already getting some awesome responses from people when they walk by on the sidewalk.  That's been keeping me motivated.  Yes, I'm a whore and I'm feeding on the attention.  waddayawantfromme?

At this point I've put in about 3 days of work and/or parts runs to get to this point.  No idea how much planning and daydreaming time, but I wouldn't even know how to measure that.  I'm up to date with my posts and pictures so anything new will be coming as it happens.

So, hopefully, you can see that for all my lack of skill and knowledge regarding wood working, I've been doing my best at each stage of the game and despite the mistakes, the result still looks pretty reasonable.   
If you are on the fence about starting a build, or even if you've previously said "Love to but I don't have the required skills", I encourage you to think about it again and give it a shot.  Can't do too much worse than me on a lot of this stuff and, as you can see, the impact is pretty minimal.

I'll continue tomorrow.  I would love to get the speaker holes cut, the monitor mount built, and a new 3/4" control panel cut - I want to try something with the joystick mounting

[yotsuya]

I'm already getting some awesome responses from people when they walk by on the sidewalk.  That's been keeping me motivated.  Yes, I'm a whore and I'm feeding on the attention.  waddayawantfromme?

Kudos to you for admitting it.

[Vidiot]

Looks like great progress to me! Your documentation is great!  I really believe that most of us are hiding some mistakes we've made when we post our pics. If not hiding, then just not mentioning them. 
I know I haven't mentioned mine. 

[uberkirby]

Looks like great progress to me! Your documentation is great!  I really believe that most of us are hiding some mistakes we've made when we post our pics. If not hiding, then just not mentioning them. 
I know I haven't mentioned mine. 

Thanks.  It's annoying when I measure and plan and the recheck and still screw something up, but its genuinely due to my basic skills and not due to lack of effort.  If the end result is a piece of garbage, this thread will be useless, but I'm pretty certain the cabinet is going to be really nice.

I'd live to see some examples of mistakes you made and how you fixed them.  I've seen your cabinets and they are really really nice.  I was just looking at your Dream Arcade thus afternoon.

If you can make a bunch of mistakes and still have your cabinets look like they do, then thats a huuuuge motivator for dudes like me.

[reptileink]

I have never let my lack of wood working knowledge stop me from attacking most projects, but then again, my projects so far have not been crucial with exactness. I built a raised garden bed two years ago which wound up needing three steps up to access for my kids. That lead me to replacing the deck stairs which was pretty easy too. I am now tackling a chicken coop and despite all my measuring twice and cutting once, I curse with every cut...lol.    Although, when I show pictures to most people, they are impressed with my work so far..lol

Not to hijack, but here is the coop:


It is currently 3/4's wrapped with plywood, but I can't get the pics off Facebook (at work).

So yea, many mistakes and gaps here, but nothing that can't be fixed.

[uberkirby]

If I had a dollar for every time somebody posted a chicken coop on an arcade forum...

I got tied up yesterday and didn't get much done.  today was a different story.

Inexplicably, I wanted to try out my new biscuit joiner and ended up starting a totally separate control panel.  My reasoning is a bit of a blur but I have an idea I want to try:

Top panel cut and sanded


Side pieces of the box cut, sanded, and traced




Dry fit


What I'm going to do is build a completely standalone control panel roughly laid out like a 2 player Tankstick.  I'm going to put an Intel NUC small form factor computer in the control panel and just expose the HDMI out and power cables on the back of the cabinet.
2 small fans on the back of the control panel will keep air circulating.

The idea is that when I go to somebody's place, I can take along a completely armed and operation arcade machine with me just by grabbing the control panel.  I got distracted yet again before I could finish the joints.

[uberkirby]

i played around with different control panel options and ended up drilling out a jig for the control setup I like best.  not I can just clamp it down on any future control panel, and route out the controls without needing to do any measuring.  I somehow missed taking a picture of the final product.

As part of the process, I also played around with different ways of mounting the U360 joystick.  I have the top mounted restrictor plate which is supposed to be mounted on top of the panel so you can easily switch from 4 way/2 way/analog.  The restrictor sits up above the control panel so you can grab it with your fingertips.  Problem with that is you can't use a dust washer like that.  For aesthetics, I want a dust washer, so I tried a few mounting options.

One that worked really well was adding another piece of 1/8" MDF below by 3/4" control panel and then mounting the joystick underneatt.  i used my router with a chamfer (I think that's what it's called) bit to cut the hole out a little wider at the top so you can lift the dust washer up and still use your fingers to adjust the restrictor plate.  Worked really well.

Here's the hole

http://i38.photobucket.com/albums/e138/kengel_photos/Cabinet%20Build/DSC_0071.jpg

Here's the joystick mounted


And here it is covered with the dust washer.  Exactly what I wanted.  No hole is visible




the one small issue is that with full articulation, the hole becomes visible again.

Here's full articulation with the 8 way.  Just barely exposes the groove on the bottom


Full articulation with the analog setting (no restrictor) is a different story

http://i38.photobucket.com/albums/e138/kengel_photos/Cabinet%20Build/DSC_0078.jpg

I don't think I care that much but if it bugs me when the cabinet is finished, I can make/order some custom oversized dust washers.  they don't need to be that much wider.  We'll see

[uberkirby]

As for cabinet build progress.  Well, long story slightly less long, a buddy came over and really liked my cabinet, so we ended up doing this.



Ignore the bottom part of the marquee.  It's just pressed in there on both cabinets for the picture and are at a completely wrong angle.  Makes everything else look crooked which is not the case.

So we smashed out a second cabinet in record time.

I just need to buy my monitor, build my monitor mount, cut my speaker holes,  and finish filling holes and mistakes.  Hopefully finish that tomorrow.  Maybe putter away on the computer and software.

Other things on the list are order T molding, order my glass bezel, figure out some way to mount a marquee with these ridiculous angles, and start on the artwork.

[brihyn]

Great work so far, love your documentation.
Here's a great tip I've learned on this cab if you want a glass or plexi over the bezel...
mount the the bezel and bottom-side marquee so that there's enough gap between the two for your glass/plexi PLUS a couple coats of paint. Then cut your glass/plexi a bit taller than you need. This cabinet allows you to slide it up between the marquee bottom and bezel, then drop it behind the cp, and it will hold nicely, but can be removed if you ever need.
On my original OND build I didn't think about that, and have a piece of quarter-round on each side of the plexi to hold it in place. The next two I built I tried the above idea, but forgot to include room for paint, so ended up having to cut away some of it with a razer blade (which sucked).
But, once I had enough cut away, I was really happy with how the plexi mounted. Plus, it makes it easy to remove to dust away the sawdust that will surely find it's way inside the cab.

[uberkirby]

Thanks for the tip.  I'll be sure to map it out with card board because I can't quite picture what you're saying. 

Did you put anything behind the marquee to keep the light from bleeding out into the main cabinet?  If so, how did you leave enough space to move the glass up?

[brihyn]

Nothing intentionally, but sort of. I mounted a 24" board across the marquee area to mount a light. it's not the full height that the space allows, but there's maybe an inch above and below it. pretty much blocked all light as I don't have any bleed-through that I've ever noticed on the three cabinets I've built.

[uberkirby]

Lots of progress.  Lots of mistakes.  Lots of fixes.

I've been pretty careful with my measurements and frankly, I'm getting better at this so the mistakes aren't quite as catastrophic by this point.  I had a couple of router slips where it cut some gouges.  More wood filler to the rescue.  I didn't take any pictures this time. Just use your imagination.

I couple of parts of the cabinet aren't 100%  square.  Like 1/8th out in some places.  Wherever it matters, a giant clamp and some wood screens puts that area back on track.

I was going to use this 230mm LED fan behind the coin door panel to blow some cool air into the cabinet.


But they are too tall and extend up into the slot that will eventually be used for a coint door.


So I just used a template like this and cut a couple of 140mm slots instead.  I think I might even like it better as it spreads the air flow over my CPU and my GPU.

[uberkirby]

I'm approaching the end of the contruction portion of the project, so I started looking for a monitor.  Originally I wanted a big TV flipped vertically to fill all of the potential space of the cabinet.  I thought I would flip the TV vertically, set my video card to 4:3 aspect ration, and the n since we're using VGA, I would use the TV controls to adjust the "virtual 4:3 monitor up or down until I got it where It wanted it.  As a bonus to that approach, You cant easily switch resolutions to play vertical games and modern 16:0 games.

But that's for the next cabinet

I found that the space allowed to me for the vertical wasn't enough to get a decent monitor in there.  I could only fit a 39" that, when flipped vertically, which would only allow for a screen 20" wide.  not what I'm looking for.

So I started the hunt for the biggest monitor I can fit in the cabinet.  Internal width is 24" so I wanted to get as close to that as possible.

Bingo.



Factory dimensions are 24.2" wide.  I figured I could de-bezel and gain that .2 back.

Sure enough, after doing that, the width was 23 15/16" and fit perfectly.  Height was 13 15/16 in case anyone was interested.

De-Bezel Pic 1



De-bezel pic 2




As an added bonus, I ran the bezel through the saw, cut the sides off  and now have the perfect mounting solution.  I'll put the cut bezel back on and use the VESA mounts on the back.

[uberkirby]

So after a couple more evenings in the garage I have the control panel sides on, the monitor bezel mounted, and the marquee bottom attached and speaker holes cut.

Here's mine.  Note the monitor bezel sans monitor.  I think I'm going to raise it up a bit, but this will definitely be my mounting solution.  24" wide mdf board + 100mm VESA hole patter = easy mounting



You can see more hole filling and smoothing I'm trying to do.  I obviously haven't quite figured out the best way to spread the wood filler.  I'm doing it the same way I would mud drywall and it's not working at all.  When I run the blade over the hole, it tends to pull the putty out of the hole as I pass over.  Mind you I've spent absolutely zero time trying to Google this.  Sanding is just so easy that I haven't bothered.

and here's the second cabinet a buddy is building alongside mine. Main differences are a simplified marquee top (The instructions were missing some measurements and directiongs, so he skipped one piece) and a 5/8" control panel top.