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hacked up wood control panel - repair it or junk it?

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krick:
The wood control panel on my cabinet was originally a 4 player machine but was later hacked into a 2 player layout.  This all happened before I acquired it.  Instead of doing this in a sensible way, they just hacked big holes in the wood around the buttons and attached the buttons directly to the plexiglass overlay.  The pictures below illustrate what I'm talking about.  The white areas are the back side of the vinyl overlay.

I'm designing a new control panel with 4 sticks and a lot of buttons.  I'd like to try to salvage my existing control panel rather than make a whole new one from scratch.  I really don't have the right tools (jigsaw, table saw, router) to properly make it.

Would it work to strip the panel down to bare wood and fill the holes in with some kind of wood filler / bondo?  I'm thinking that I'll have to cut some grooves in the openings parallel to the control panel surface to give the filler something to hold onto.  Or possibly drill some holes parallel to the surface and insert small dowels that project into the openings where the filler will go.

I think that my finished panel surface will be covered with plexiglass so I'm not too concerned about people pounding on it and popping the filler through.  However, I am concerned about leverage force from joysticks cracking things.

I know someone has been down this road before.  Thoughts?

...
Krick





Stingray:
I'd junk it. Trying to fix it would be more trouble than it's worth, IMO. Much faster to start with a fresh piece of wood.

-S

Edgedamage:
I second that I had a killer instinct with a huge hole in the middle of the panel. Just use the old one as a template and start fresh.

Ken Layton:
I vote for fixing it. Get some Bondo and the fiberglass mesh screening for it to stick to/form.

SirPeale:
I gotta vote for 'junk it' too.  Wood putty/bondo would just be more work than necessary.  Why would you do that, Ken?

Just get a piece of ply the right size, and cut out a new piece with a router and a template bit.  Take you all of five minutes.  then you can lay out the controls as you see fit.

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