Stage 2 – Initial Designs

With a working prototype control panel, it was now time to make some decisions. I spent a huge chunk of time reading through posts on the byoac forums. Things were similar to the way I built my first arcade cabinet back in 2006, but there were also a lot of changes. The most challenging was the number of options out there now. Just in push buttons alone, there are a lot of different items to choose from. Do you want a soft/hard push, how sensitive should the response be, do you want it to click, and LEDs. Oh, the LEDs.

Fortunately, I found one thread from ChanceKJ that thoroughly documented his arcade cabinet process. I didn’t want a 4 player cab or a similar shaped cab, but there were a lot of good ideas in there and his thoroughness was very helpful in making some of my own decisions. I also was looking at cabinet shapes/designs quite a bit during this time. One of the cabinet designs really appealed to me, dubbed the “Vigolix“. A combination of username “Vigo” and the “Viewlix” style cabs. It was a simple and stylish design. Only issue was that it wasn’t a full scale cabinet, so I figured I would just ‘scale it up!’.

Vigo’s Vigolix cabinet in red (on the left). Delusional29’s Vigolix inspired cab on the right.

With a design in mind, some rough schematics, I set out to the local hardware store.

Getting that large sheet of MDF on the cart all by myself certainly brought back memories.

Making the first few cuts, I started to realize that simply “scaling up” the Vigolix design wasn’t going to work out like I thought.

(ignore the broken tip at the top, it got dropped and we planned to remedy that by lopping it off)

The top seemed way too pointy and thin, and the bottom/base seemed way too wide. Here’s my disclaimer once again, don’t do what I do, because other people have successfully pulled off full scale models of this cabinet. So I’m not totally sure where I screwed up this part.

All was not totally lost though. If it’s one thing I’ve learned from my hobbies, the different between novice and master seems to be “learning how to recover from mistakes”! I’ve ran across this in all sorts of art, painting miniature, and especially in woodworking. There always seems to be a way to fix mistakes without having to completely start over. Yea, mistakes can cost you time and money, but at least there is usually a solution.

So in the example above, I noticed that the side panel jutted out way too far. This was a potential tripping hazard for the little one and teen. Also a good chance of that corner breaking off at some point. Another saw cut and a router pattern bit got me back on track. Might be hard to see in these pics, but I also made the t-molding cuts early on. On my first cab, I didn’t make the slot cut until after I had painted the cabinet. I was super lucky to have not scratched the paint at that point, but I didn’t want to risk it again.

“T-molding” is the plastic bumper that they used to line the edges of the cabinet and protect it from wear and tear. You can get it in all kinds of different colors, and really gives the cabinet that distinctive arcade look.

This seems like a good place to wrap up, and will start with some more woodworking pics in the next post (I promise!).