Building The (Im)Perfect Beast, Part 2: Literal Electric Boogaloo
I've kinda moved over mostly to Tumblr as the Ruskie spammers' blitzkrieg on my comments section is kind of phhhhhlllllt, and I mostly communicate photographically these days. But lets finish what I started so I can move this to its own domain at some point. I'll keep this somewhat short and lacking in details that I'll add once it's ported to an actual website so that I can get this damn thing done.
Remember when HR tags were cool? I try to forget.
The next step was to cut the siding using a table saw and nail it to the frame using a brad gun. Corner protectors were bradded (is that a real word? Who cares? Not me) onto the corners.
The original plan for the glass top was to cut some glass with some kind of a glass cutting contraption that one of our friends in the windmill business has. However, Shane was about to donate an old end table with a glass top to St. Vinnies and asked if I wanted to use the glass top for the MAME cabinet instead of cutting glass. I thought about it for a while and figured why not, we were already deviating massively from the blueprints, lets see how cheap we can go. It worked perfectly.
Cutting and fitting the control panels was probably the biggest challenge we faced. I'll spare the details for now and maybe insert them later, but we ended up getting creative and eventually found a way to make them somewhat stable using particle board and wood screws. Eventually it was decided that the easiest way to make the control panel removable for adding or fixing controls was to not really make it removable. Shane says it shouldn't be too much of an issue to unscrew a few of the wood screws if I needed to change or fix the controls and then screw them back in, so that is what the plan will be. (To this day, a year later, I still haven't unscrewed either control panel, though I plan to do it soon as you'll see later.)
The button, joystick, and spinner holes are all 1 and 1/4 inch in diameter so that I'd only need to buy one drill bit, and that's pretty much the standard sizes for the spinner and joystick holes anyway. As for the design of the control panel, I just planned it in my head and then traced it onto cardboard and then used the piece of cardboard as a template to drill the holes. I forgot to plan out the holes for the 1 and 2 player buttons, which turned out to be another blessing in disguise. Shane suggested I put them on the front or sides of the control panel. Brilliant. I decided to put them on the front in case I decided at some point in the future to add pinball flipper buttons to the side.
At first I planned on leaving the sides unpainted and wood colored like most of the cocktail cabinets from the 80's, but I did some testing and decided that it would look 342% more awesomer if I spray painted them black with glossy spray paint. So I painted everything black and put several layers of liquid polyurethane on the control areas to give them some protection from getting damaged by angry fists and fingernails. We spray pained the sides of the the glass black on the underside so that actual cocktails won't damage the paint.
Added some pads to keep the glass from touching the wood (and to give a little space for top ventilation without the need for more hole drilling), added some small wooden feet and pads to the bottom, and we were finished with cabinet construction. All that was left was to add the electronics, which will be part 3 when I get done with that next week or next year or next never.
Remember when HR tags were cool? I try to forget.
The next step was to cut the siding using a table saw and nail it to the frame using a brad gun. Corner protectors were bradded (is that a real word? Who cares? Not me) onto the corners.
The original plan for the glass top was to cut some glass with some kind of a glass cutting contraption that one of our friends in the windmill business has. However, Shane was about to donate an old end table with a glass top to St. Vinnies and asked if I wanted to use the glass top for the MAME cabinet instead of cutting glass. I thought about it for a while and figured why not, we were already deviating massively from the blueprints, lets see how cheap we can go. It worked perfectly.
Cutting and fitting the control panels was probably the biggest challenge we faced. I'll spare the details for now and maybe insert them later, but we ended up getting creative and eventually found a way to make them somewhat stable using particle board and wood screws. Eventually it was decided that the easiest way to make the control panel removable for adding or fixing controls was to not really make it removable. Shane says it shouldn't be too much of an issue to unscrew a few of the wood screws if I needed to change or fix the controls and then screw them back in, so that is what the plan will be. (To this day, a year later, I still haven't unscrewed either control panel, though I plan to do it soon as you'll see later.)
The button, joystick, and spinner holes are all 1 and 1/4 inch in diameter so that I'd only need to buy one drill bit, and that's pretty much the standard sizes for the spinner and joystick holes anyway. As for the design of the control panel, I just planned it in my head and then traced it onto cardboard and then used the piece of cardboard as a template to drill the holes. I forgot to plan out the holes for the 1 and 2 player buttons, which turned out to be another blessing in disguise. Shane suggested I put them on the front or sides of the control panel. Brilliant. I decided to put them on the front in case I decided at some point in the future to add pinball flipper buttons to the side.
At first I planned on leaving the sides unpainted and wood colored like most of the cocktail cabinets from the 80's, but I did some testing and decided that it would look 342% more awesomer if I spray painted them black with glossy spray paint. So I painted everything black and put several layers of liquid polyurethane on the control areas to give them some protection from getting damaged by angry fists and fingernails. We spray pained the sides of the the glass black on the underside so that actual cocktails won't damage the paint.
Added some pads to keep the glass from touching the wood (and to give a little space for top ventilation without the need for more hole drilling), added some small wooden feet and pads to the bottom, and we were finished with cabinet construction. All that was left was to add the electronics, which will be part 3 when I get done with that next week or next year or next never.