Furniture grade cocktail arcade cabinet

Step 11 1 Year look back

So on a wintery February night I delivered the cabinet to Arvonn and Dorothy, who were ecstatic. Arvonn is a huge geek and immediately stripped it down and installed his own build of linux . Later while moving across the country or playing with the hardware, the CRT broke and was replaced with a cheap LCD, so now when they want to play, they remove the glass table top, and tip the monitor cabinet up on it's side. They were having trouble with the LCD's viewing angle distorting colors and the smoked glass blocking too much light.

Looking at the comments in the instructable, I've decided to add some ways of making the whole thing a little simpler. First off, the whole thing is much easier to build if you use MDF instead of pine. I've added an image showing the layout on page 4, but it's reproduced here as well. Second, one of the most annoying parts of construction was accurately building the side covers - it is pretty much totally unnecessary to use the perforated metal. Just make two curved end braces per side. Thirdly, I wish I had put some hinges on the thing. Right now the sides are screwed on and the top just sits there. You'd need to find some of those "European" kitchen cabinet hinges which have a virtual axle. Along with that you could put some desk braces on the lid to make the cabinet adjustable.

The finished product is a little larger than I'd like, but works very well. If I was to make it again I'd try to make it more modular and upgradable. Technology is always going to move forward, and it would be great to be able to take advantage of it. Also - make sure to get samples of all the buttons you want to use - button feel can really vary and the ones I chose for the top 3 feel really crappy :(