Pinky McJuke - Believe it or not, work continues =)

[Franco B]

Okay, lame name I know. We'll call it a working title for now  

I've been looking to do a juke or two for a while now. I want to do a jukebox for my girlfriend (suprise Xmas/b'day present) as well as a rotating bartop/jukebox for me. The only thing that has been holding me back is trying to find decent touchscreens over here. I was tempted to join in on the ELO group buy recently but I wasn't too keen on getting something that fragile shipped over from the US.

I have been watching eBay religiously for the last few months and all of the touchscreens seem to be going for crazy prices for what they are. I logged on the other day and found an auction for a 17" 3M ChassisTouch touch screen. I looked into the auction further and I was quite excited to see the seller had two 17" 2nd hand touchscreens at BIN for £100 each. That may seem expensive to some of you guys but most of the 15+" touchscreens I have been watching have been going for £100+. I wanted at least one 17" (for my bartop) and seeing as there were two at that price I couldn't resist. They are about £500 new so I thought aslong as there were no major flaws with them then that would be a good deal. The company I bought them from are a computer spares company and they come  with a 90 day warranty which was a major bonus. 17" may be a little big for her Juke but she will just have to deal with it  

Ok, so enough of the background. Onto the project.

I don't have much of a spec at the moment apart from it is going to be PINK! I have got a couple of designs in mind and I'm just thrashing the contruction out in my head and AutoCAD at the moment.

As for a PC I managed to get a 1GHZ Mini ITX board with 512MB RAM off eBay yesterday which should more than suffice for a juke. I got it for just over £40 delivered which I thought was a good buy.



(eBay pic I know, I'm still waiting for it to arrive).

The touchscreens connect to the PC via a serial cable and I was a bit dubious whether they would work or not, especially as they didn't come with serial cables but I had the 90 day warranty to back me up. Anyway, I hooked one up with a serial cable, installed the drivers I downloaded from 3Ms site and they work beautifully! I could quite happily play with the desktop opening and closing folders etc for ages!   (You know what they say, simple things..........)

The colour is crisp and bright and they are surprisingly responsive. I threw Mountain of Faith at it and it looked beautiful. I thought if it could handle that then anything else wouldn't be a problem.

I took a photo and some video but the picture corrupted so Im only left with the video:



The quality sucks due to the uploading compression but it does look awesome in the flesh so to speak

For the colour scheme I'm thinking pink laminate with white or silver accents or possibly both.

I think I'm going to use the Dell laptop speakers that mountain used as they seem to be pretty decent for there size. I know mike knows his audio stuff and if he is happy with them I'm sure they will be fine for casual listing. I'm also going to have an I/O port on the back for powered output, composite output and USB etc.

I think that's about it for now. Ill get some designs up once I have straightened out this swirly mess in my head!

[Paulson]

 Hi Franco, Good to see another project underway...I'll be very interested
 to see how this pans out as I'm interested in doing a juke myself @ a
 later date.

 Good luck....

 Paulson.

[javeryh]

Woo hoo!!! 

PINK!!!!

Ahem, sorry... I sort of have a thing for all pink projects...  I can't wait to see what you come up with!   

[Franco B]

 

I thought you would approve!   

Im planning on laminate at the moment but its causing a couple of problems at the moment. Hopefully nothing that will get in the way but if it does I will be following a certain painting process to the T, or should that be the P?! 

[thatitalian]

Ahhh, starting the juke you wanted to do! Good luck with that mate!!!

Need any help with art let me know!

[polaris]

Im planning on laminate at the moment but its causing a couple of problems at the moment.

pink laminate not too common then?

have a  look at this stuff
its sticky backed plastic basically, but high quality, you can order a free swatchbook at the bottom of the page, it wont be cheap to buy though.

[leapinlew]

Is that the Galaga sequel playing on the video?   

[javeryh]

I thought you would approve!   

Im planning on laminate at the moment but its causing a couple of problems at the moment. Hopefully nothing that will get in the way but if it does I will be following a certain painting process to the T, or should that be the P?! 

What kind of trouble?  Is pink laminate hard to come by?  I do know that I never want to paint another cab like that again (well, not for a long time anyway).  I was thinking of another pink cabinet some time in the future but I was planning to laminate like THIS ONE by sealslayer.  He even said that "Its laminated with "juicy pink" Formica, the cost is around £70 for a 10' x 4' sheet." 

 

[polaris]

javeryh
laminate is hard to come by 
uk laminate discussion

[thatitalian]

javeryh
laminate is hard to come by 
uk laminate discussion

Yeah, tell me about it! UK is pretty poor considering its approx 61 million population!

[Franco B]

Thanks for the input guys 

That site looks interesting polaris, Ill have a good look around there tomorrow at work.

No, buying the laminate in inself isn't the problem, its more of a mounting/positional problem at the moment. I'm just trying to weigh up the pro and cons of all the solutions for now. Laminate would be my ideal choice though.

I have actually managed to stumble across another UK laminate supplier (which claim to be the UKs leading distributor) which sell half/smaller sheets too!  Ill update the other thread once I get some pricing info.

 

[thatitalian]

Have you seen this?

http://www.formica.co.uk/publish/site/eu/uk/en/home/collection/plain_colors.psresults.html?search_term=F0232&search_atom=ProductID

[mountain]

Cool! Should be interesting to watch. I really enjoy working on the smaller bartop style machines. It is easier on the back. 

Good luck keeping this a secret from the GF.

[drawfull]

Hey Franco

I ordered a 15" ELO off eBay on Weds for a Juke I'm building for my partner for Xmas. I'm in the isle of man so suffer your price pain. Paid £100 shipped but it's used. I pick it up tomorrow.

Was hoping to interface to a AppleTV but not convinced it's within my skill set. Will be following this with interest, and might have a project of my own soon.... Found a cool sign shop  here that can print full colour to any 'board' type material. have seen what they can do for Microgaming who are based here - bloody good stuff and would make awesome cabinet sides

Good luck with your project

Df

[ex_directory]

Hey bud, good luck with this project - can recommend DWJukebox software which has a forum here, very customisable, I am planning on using this on my cab. Will be watching this with interest.

Ex (babe!)

[Paulson]

Hey bud, good luck with this project - can recommend DWJukebox software which has a forum here, very customisable, I am planning on using this on my cab. Will be watching this with interest.

Ex (babe!)

 Interesting...Is DW Jukebox easy to set up? Surely these days we expect
 most software to do the job with the least amount of hassle as possible.

[Franco B]

have a  look at this stuff
its sticky backed plastic basically, but high quality, you can order a free swatchbook at the bottom of the page, it wont be cheap to buy though.

I sent off for a sample swatch and after looking at it it seems it would mark too easily. Most of the samples are about 0.002" thick and it wouldn't take much to damage it.

Have you seen this?

http://www.formica.co.uk/publish/site/eu/uk/en/home/collection/plain_colors.psresults.html?search_term=F0232&search_atom=ProductID

Thanks for the link thatitalian (you too javeryh). I think that is the perfect pink. I going to shoot out a couple of emails to get some prices for some.

 

Good luck keeping this a secret from the GF.

I'm lucky that she kinda ignores me when I'm working on my cab as she's not really interested. Ill be ok up to the part where the pink laminate comes out, that when I'm going to have to go into stealth build mode 

Hey Franco

I ordered a 15" ELO off eBay on Weds for a Juke I'm building for my partner for Xmas. I'm in the isle of man so suffer your price pain. Paid £100 shipped but it's used. I pick it up tomorrow.

Was hoping to interface to a AppleTV but not convinced it's within my skill set. Will be following this with interest, and might have a project of my own soon.... Found a cool sign shop  here that can print full colour to any 'board' type material. have seen what they can do for Microgaming who are based here - bloody good stuff and would make awesome cabinet sides

Good luck with your project

Df

Yeah the prices over here seem crazy compared to what the guys in the US can pick them up for. Good luck with your project too, make sure you do a project announcement. Mine has to be finshed for crimbo too so we may be able to help each other along the way. 

Hey bud, good luck with this project - can recommend DWJukebox software which has a forum here, very customisable, I am planning on using this on my cab. Will be watching this with interest.

Ex (babe!)

Thanks for the heads up bud. There has been plenty of discussion about various software in [Kaytrims juke PA] too . I think ill try a few out and see what I think will work best.

Thanks for the input guys 

[Chris]

 Interesting...Is DW Jukebox easy to set up? Surely these days we expect
 most software to do the job with the least amount of hassle as possible.

Some find it easy, some less so.  It uses text-based configuration files for everything, no nice graphical setup program.

[Paulson]

 Hmmm...I think I would rather spend more time building it than
 programming it...if you catch my drift?


                                      P (UK)

[Chris]

Well, that's how I feel about writing setup programs, which is why it doesn't have one yet!   

[Franco B]

We have progress! 

Ive been busy obtaining materials and components as I couldn't get on with the CAD model until I knew what I had to play with. I have enough components now so its on with the show.

This is what I'm planning to make, ignore the colourscheme, Ive just coloured the parts so its easier to see and explain. The model isn't complete but I have managed to get enough data from it to start building.

Front View:





Side Profile:



I'm going for a table top juke with the screen set back at 15 degrees. I'm using a 17" so I wanted to keep the size of the juke down and have a relatively small foot print. The yellow section obv is the monitor, the green section is the Dell speaker bar (a la' mountain) and the blue sections are the end pieces/feet. The front and back of the juke are going to be faced with 5mm pink plexi and the rest will be pink polycarb overlay (CPO) or similar.

As far as colour scheme I'm going for pink with chrome t-moulding, some other chrome striping and a couple of stainless steel accents here and there. You can see an array of 32 pink dots around the screen. I'm planning on putting an LED Wiz in too to control some pink LEDs for fun.

I picked up a [300W Micro ATX Silent P4 PSU] for £14.53 from www.microdirect.co.uk. The same PSU is £40 in Maplins so I thought that was a pretty good deal.



Okay, on with the construction. The jukes profile is basically a big wedge with a large radius at the top and two smaller radii at the bottom. All of the radii are too small to be able to bend 3mm MDF comfortably so I came up with another solution to create the radii.

I picked up a section of 110mm OD soil pipe from B&Q:



I chopped a section out of it and took it to work. The first thing I did was to face it to length on a center lathe so it was the same length as the monitor (405mm):



(You will have to excuse me for some of these pics, I only had my camera phone on me and it doesn't always take the best pictures).

My screen will be set back at 15 degrees so the angle between the front section and the back of the juke is 165 degrees. I needed to cut a 165 degree section out of the pipe to form the top radius so I made a combined angle gauge, router template and drilling template:

I turned a ring to match the inside diameter of the soil pipe (102.7mm):



I then drilled and c/sunk holes for dowels and for fixing the template for routing (all will become clear later), I also spot marked out the 165 degree and using the CNC mill and a center drill:



Finally I hacksawed the part of I didn't need and filed the gauge/template to size:



I clamped the pipe to the m/c table and clocked it true. I used a 3mm cutter and carefully milled a groove just over half way through the wall thickness:



I then rotated the tube and used a engineers square along with the gauge template I made to set the machine so that the next cut would leave me with a 165 degree section. I milled just over half way again and removed the pipe from the m/c:



All I had to do then was hacksaw the remaining material in the groove and file the excess to meet the milled line.

Here is a photo of the finished section with the gauge/template in it and also with the 1/4" stainless tube in using for dowels:



I'm going to use the template/gauge to template route three or four pieces of MDF (the same shape as the template) and then use the holes to align the pillar drill to drill the dowel holes so it all lines up nicely. The MDF cut outs will support the tube and help to keep it nice and strong.

For the bottom to radii I was going to do something similar with some 50mm OD tube but I called into B&Q on the way to work today and they have some 21x21 pine quadrant (42mm OD) that I'm going to use instead. I will have a 15 degree gap to fill but that wont be a problem.

Ive got the day off tomorrow so I'm hoping to get as much of the construction done as possible.

[javeryh]

 

I feel like such a chump!  I cannot wait to see this thing unfold. 

I have a question about the sound bar - do you know if the speakers are up against the face or perpendicular to the bottom?  I guess I want to know if you mount the speaker bar with the sloped face flush with the front panel will the speakers be facing out or angled up (or down)?   

[thatitalian]

Alright alright. No need to make our projects look rubbish with your god like metal skills!

[Franco B]

Ha ha! Cheers guys! I wouldnt go that far tho thatitalian 

As regards to the speaker bar, the front face is not square to the top/bottom, it slopes back at about 10-15 degrees. Im just going to put it inside the case and then have an extra grill (a 'la mountain again) between the speaker bar and plexi to hide it.

[mountain]

Alright alright. No need to make our projects look rubbish with your god like metal skills!

Seconded!

I don't even know what that is in the last picture, but I am in awe of it!

[javeryh]

As regards to the speaker bar, the front face is not square to the top/bottom, it slopes back at about 10-15 degrees. Im just going to put it inside the case and then have an extra grill (a 'la mountain again) between the speaker bar and plexi to hide it.

OK, so you are going to have it sloped inside your juke (which makes sense since you juke is set back at an angle).  I guess what I'm asking is how does the sound come out of the thing?

Check out my awesome drawing - green is the profile, red is the speaker and the arrow represents sound coming out of it.  Real scientific!  Which picture more accurately describes what is going on inside?

[Franco B]

Mountain, I understand its quite hard to visualise. Ill get some pics up tomorrow once I have had a play, you will be able to see what Im on about.

jav, at the moment im planning on mounting the speaker horizontally (like your first picture) as thats the way it would have been mounted to the bottom of an LCD. They may have manufactured the speaker bar so that the speakers themselves are angled inside the casing already. If so the emitted sound will be directed more like your 2nd picture. I hope that makes sense.   

[Franco B]

This is the 21mm radius quarter section  got from B&Q:



I made a few circle/radius templates tonight that will give me some nice smooth corners when I'm routing the various radii on the project. I left the previous template I made for scale. (They are quick and dirty templates I made on our Russian lathe, hence the bad surface finish )



The small ones have a radius of 21mm to match the quarter section. The brass ones have a radius of 31mm to match the radius of the two bottom radii of the jukes feet and the larger one has an OD radius of 130mm for routing the radius at the top of the jukes feet. The feet are the same profile as the 'inner section' but have been externally offset 10mm, hence the 10mm size increase of the radius templates.

[Paulson]

 Great work...can't wait to see this take shape...now you've got the general
 CAD sorted...

 

[ratzz]

Looking good buddy ...

[Franco B]

Ok, template routing if officially my new favourite thing 

I used the template to mark out the pieces to go inside the pipe:



I roughly jigsawed the excess material and then template routed the pieces:



I used the template again to drill the holes for the dowels. I'm using 1/4" (6.35mm) stainless steel tubing so I drilled the MDF with a 6.5mm drill. The dowels slide nicely through the material but they are not overly tight or loose either:



This left me with four identical pieces:



I test fitted the pieces in position. A perfect fit if I do say so myself 



The dowels will eventually be cut to length also run through the 'inner side' pieces once I have them cut out.

[thatitalian]

That must have been a b***h to route! Your fingers must have been pretty close!

[Franco B]

It wasn't too bad to be honest. You soon get the feel of it. I used the same method to make the CP ends of my cocktail so I had some practice from that. You do have to be carefull tho, one slip and it would be bye bye fingers. 

Well Ive done a fair bit more since this mornings update. For a start I made a template to route the 'inner side' pieces:



I then used that to template route the two sides and drill the mating holes for the top radius skeleton:



I then test fitted the components and cut the dowels to length:



I also tried the plastic pipe and the 21mm rad pine section:





Perfect As you can see the pine section sticks out slightly (3mm and 5mm to be precise) .I offset the pine section as  I'm using 3mm pink acrylic on the back and 5mm pink acrylic on the front. As they are offset  they should marry up nicely with the acrylic.

[javeryh]

Wow Franco - you really have some skills.  All of your lines are very clean and your measurements are spot on.  Plus you are fast!  I can already envision the final product and I'm jealous.  A pink jukebox?  It's like a dream to me!   

[Kaytrim]

Alright alright. No need to make our projects look rubbish with your god like metal skills!

Seconded!

I don't even know what that is in the last picture, but I am in awe of it!

And this comes from the guy that started all this.    Don't sell yourself too short mountain, you have some serious skills too.

Keep it up Franco, I'll be keeping an eye on this one.  I think that after this weekend I'll be able to get back into the shop and get busy on my wife's juke.  And some other projects that I have in the works.

TTFN
Kaytrim

[Martijn]

Excellent work on Pinky ! Your skills are indeed fast and accurate

[Paulson]

 Looks like it's gonna be a good build...mind you I kinda expect quality from a top builder eh?

[Franco B]

Thanks for the kind words guys! I'm quite happy with the way things have gone so far but there is still plenty of time for things to go pear shaped!

I was hoping to carry on the other evening and get plenty more done but I couldn't find the brand new set of pattern trim bits that I had bought from the states. I have been using flush trim bits so far but I needed the pattern bits to route out the relief for the monitor rear casing. I spent about two hours looking for them but I couldn't find them so I ended up calling it a day.

In the mean time I got a 1/4" (inner race bore) x 3/4" (outer race OD) bearing from work to use with one of my 1/2" straight bits. The 3/4" bearing is obviously 1/4" bigger than my straight bit but its no biggie as I can just make the template 1/8" bigger all round.

Before I routed the relief I made the template for the side panels using the radii templates i made at work before flush trimming between the tangents of the circles with a straight edge:
 




Finished template:



I used the template to template route the two side panels before moving onto the monitor reliefs.

I made a 1/8" oversize template for the monitor reliefs and used my improvised straight bit/bearing combo to route the open pocket:



Pic of the routed pockets and also the end panels:



I sill need to route the lower radius on the bottom of the foot but I'm going to wait to do that until later. That's the beauty of using templates and you can modify your original template and then realign it using the same anchor points and take any necessary adjustments.

Finally I just test fitted the monitor and side panels:







All seems to be good so far

Ive also been able to persuade thatitallian to work on my artwork for me (thanks again bud ). We have bounced a couple of ideas backwards and forwards and he is working on it for me, ill post some pics to see what you guys think when we have got something solid.

[javeryh]

Wow Franco - I am in awe.  I really really love the shape you've come up with and the laid back angle of the monitor.  I can't wait to see it turn pink!

Those routing templates that you made for the curves are awesome.  A few months back I was looking for those exact things to make rounding corners more precise than just "sand to the line" but as far as I could tell they didn't exist.  Great minds think alike I guess... 

[NiN^_^NiN]

Looking smick franco i like the design and seeing the LCD installed really looks good can't wait to see the finished product