Build Your Own Arcade Controls Forum
Main => Main Forum => Topic started by: Negativecreep0 on February 21, 2004, 01:05:53 pm
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I am new at building a whole arcade from scratch and bought plans for the Ultimate arcade II. So i cut one pieces out for one side of the arcade top, then the other side out. My prolem now is, both arent exactly even. Some sides are about 1/8 inch off the front cut is maybe a little lower than the other. My question is how can i fix this? is there wood putty or something i can add to the bood ends to make it even? I am gonna be putting laminate over it at the end so ugly fillings doesn't matter to me. Thanks for any help guys.
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If you can get away with clipping off an 1/8'' on the strong sides of your cabinet, I would do that. Clamp your 2 sides to gether and using your fence and cicular saw recut the sides. Now, you should have perfectly identical sides. Or if you have a belt sander, clamp the sides together and carefully sand the sides till they are even. An 1/8'' isn't much to worry about.
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A much better way is to clamp the two sides together and run a router around the whole thing with a flush trim bit or a template bit. It's fast, extraordinarily easy and will make the two sides EXACT replicas of eachother.
Oh yeah....to repair as far as adding goes, rather than cutting one down you can mix saw dust and good wood glue into a thick paste and put that on there. Once it dries sand it down. It's hard as a rock.
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with the flush bit, do I want one with the round slider thing on the bottom of the bit? and what would i do? How would i auto stop once its shaved off enough? would the flush bit auto stop it from cutting anymore?
never used a flush bit just slot cutter thanks for the replies
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Okay...I've drawn a very crude example of how it works. I hope it's not so crude that you can't see what I'm trying to illustrate. Okay, the bearing (slider thing) allows the shank (the inside part of the bit that the blades are attached to and the bearing sits around) to spin inside of it indepentantly of the spinning of the bearing. So (DON'T TRY THIS!!!) you could actually hold onto the bearing so it was not moving while the bit spins through the middle of it upwards of 20,000 RPMs. If you look at the illustration you will see that the blades would cut into the board up to the point where the bearing hits the other board. Now you cand just run the router all the way around the edges of your side panels and the blade will cut the bottom board until it looks exactly like the top board.
Keep in mind that the bit can be moved up and down on a router so you can position the blade so it is only touching the board you want to cut and the bearing so it is only touching the board you don't want to cut.
Also, the boards in my picture are obviously not to scale. Routers are small and easy to handle (though extremely powerful. Be careful, and trust me, you've never seen sawdust until you've used a router. Wear eye protection and a dust mask. A good drill spins a bit about 2,500 RPMs. A router spins a bit up to 30,000 RPMs.)
By the way, a template bit or flush trim bit will work. The only difference is that on a template bit the bearing is at the top (closest to the part of the shank that fits into the router) while a flush trim bit has the bearing on bottom. Either will work just as well (though I'm partial to the template bit cos you can see what you're doing better); you would just flip the boards you're cutting over for one or the other. For a flush trim bit you put your pattern board on bottom and the board to be cut on top. Vice versa for the pattern bit.
edit: ah...I just noticed that you've used a slot cutter. I guess I didn't need to explain the size of a router and the fact that the bit can be moved up and down. :)