Building the cabinet

The photos are transfered from my mobile, so here another update of the cabinet so far

The wood is plywood. Looks very nice unpainted already if you ask me. The first thing I did is stabalise the cabinet. So it holds itself together. I prefered this method because now it becomes visible of what you make and adjust anything you like.

Most cabinets are build with a predefined plan. Designed on paper with al measures set etc. I guess it depends on what you prefer. Technically I think making a plan is wiser to do, but this works for me.

Some more about the wood. Plywood is strong ans has a nice structure and colour. But most cabinets are build of MDF material.

MDF material has a smoother surface wich is better to paint and the wood is easy to work with. Also it's much cheaper compared to plywood.






Ooops miscalculated a bit here, yes the marquee part is a bit off at the lower part. Will correct that.

Room enough for the computer hardware. The control panel part is attached with a so called piano hinge.

I removed it again because there is a lot of work to do on the control panel. And this part attached at this moment is just not so clever :) 

The monitor inserted, a 17". The angle of the monitor set.

Side art arrived

Today the stickers arrived! I ordered them on Ebay from Idoluxman in Israel. They are originally intended as wallstickers, but in this case they can be used perfectly on the cabinet. I checked some sites offering side-art but the price is far to high and doing painting/printing myself is something I don't wan't to loose too much time on in this project atleast. Maybe for a next project.

The material looks like good quality suited for cabinet art.

How it starts

It starts with deciding on what to make. A full scale cabinet, a Bartop (Barcade) or a mini cabinet.
I had some wood already from repairing the house last summer so that could be used again. I decided to go for the mini-cabinet. Looking at the measures i'd more say a midi cabinet because it can be made smaller if you want.

OK, next decission is the style of the cabinet. There are so many nice examples of classics designs and projects with custom designs. The classic Pacman style cabinet is one of my favourites.

this is an example of such cabinet:

The measures are 41cm width and 122cm high.

The wood I had was 244cm this cut into 2 pieces gives the 122cm

41cm is based on the 17" monitor plus some space left for  monitor bezel.

An exact building plan with all measures and a term/verb list will be posted and linked in one of the next updates.

The sawing:

The 244 was cut into 2 pieces and placed on top of eachother tight together by clamps. You really need clamps to get an exact match of the sawing at both sides.

Now it's time to draw the outlines of the cabinet to get the shape ready. To get the upper side smootly drawn i used a lineal with a pencil attached to it. Center the lineal somewhere next to the board and draw the (part of) the circle on the wood. The result is a perfect round corner.

This method is used to draw the angle just above the middle and the part at top of the cabinet with slightly round angles.

After this was done it's sawing time with the Jig Saw.

Mini Arcade!

Something I've wanted to do for weeks finally started. Maintaining a blog about the cool project i started a few weeks ago. Building an arcade! The idea is to make it for my son, but to be honest i'm also enthousiast because of the nostalgic feeling i have with these machines!

I remember the days on vacation with my parents during the 80's early 90's spending time in the arcade hall of the resort playing Galaga and score a free play on the pinball machine. That was great.
Remember other game titles as Outrun, Afterburner, Supersprint. Maybe more pop up during this blog.

Anyway what triggered me to get this thing started was the movie 'A fistful of quarters'. A must-see for arcade fans. It made me curious about todays arcade scene and so i discovered the whole MAME community. To my surprise the arcade scene is very active. Maybe not that much in the Netherlands, but still on internet there is a lot to read and discover about this.

Anyway, back to the reason to create this BLOG :)

Owning an arcade is fun, building even more. 

As written, i've started building, i'll post the photos in the next updates so you can see what left to do. Also in this BLOG tips and tricks i ran into. I'm not that experienced with wiring and woodworking so if you dive into some kind of same project there might be something usefull to read for you.