The T-Molding

As I said in my last post, I gave up on trying to drill the holes in the control panel. But I felt like I had to do something, so I installed the t-molding. It was a fairly straightforward process. All I used was a mallet and a box knife. The mallet is to hit the molding into place. The knife is for cutting the part that goes into the MDF, the | part of the T, if that makes sense. If it's an outside angle/radius, you have to cut some away, to basically keep it from running into itself, think about a miter, except it doesn't have to be precise. With an inside angle/radius, you have a couple of different options. The first is to just cut the molding like you did with the outside angle. The other option is to just cut slots in it, and since they are spreading out, they won't run into each other. Honestly, I went back and forth between the two. Another thing that came in handy was a piece of wood with a 45 degree angel on it. This was great for hammering the molding into corners.

After I got it in on both sides, I realized that I may have damaged the paint job slightly. It shouldn't be too bad, since my room isn't super bright, and should hide the flaws well enough.
Another thing I realized, and a lesson for you all, is that if you decide to make a MAME cabinet, make sure that the edge that the t-molding is going on is smooth. I thought I could get away with not working too hard on it, after all, I figured that the molding would cover most of the flaws. I was wrong. It's not super noticeable, but it is there: just a slight variation, almost a ripple.

Status Update

Just because I haven't been posting doesn't mean I haven't been working on it.  June 29 - July 1 I was gone at the college orientation, but I did manage to put a coat of primer on before I left. Even before that, I drilled out as much of the control panel as I could, but I'll get into that later. As soon as I got home, my friend Wesley arrived from Oklahoma, and we worked on it a lot, but we were having so much fun I didn't get a chance to blog about it. To start with, we put more coats of paint on. The primer was white, and I wanted the cabinet to be black, so we ended up putting 2 coats on. We had some paint left, so we added another coat on the side that will be seen when walking into my room.

Here it is painted. That's my elbow sticking out.

We also spent a lot of time on the software aspect. We were originally going to go with Windows 2000, but we were having so much trouble trying to get it to boot up to do a fresh install, we gave up on that computer and went with Windows XP. We are going to use MAMEWah for the frontend. A really cool thing that Wes did was modify the Windows XP splash/loading screen to have the MAME logo instead, so this way when you boot up you will see a MAME logo instead of Windows XP.
We didn't do much with the controls other than a couple of things. One thing we did was hook up the spinner. This was the easiest thing to do since it just hooks up via USB. It is recognized as a mouse, so we had to configure both the frontend and the actual emulator to accept mouse input. We also visited my neighbor to get some advice. He sometimes wires up airplane control panels, so we figured he would be a good person to ask about wiring. One thing he told us was that we should use different colors of wire for the controls, to distinguish the different buttons, and make different bundles to rout around. He showed us a connector, and when he told us we didn't have to have them all in a sheath, as his were, but when I saw that, I remembered that my dad had a big spool of Cat5e ethernet cable. It will work great, since the biggest number of buttons we will have is 6, and and Cat5e has 8 wires, so we will have 1 left over, assuming I run all the ground together, which it will be eventually anyway. We also worked on the speakers. I had a set of computer speakers in my shop, so we took them apart, and hooked them up to the 4" speakers we had. Also for convenience sake, we used hot glue and glued the amplifier onto one of the speakers, simply to make it easier when installing them.
July 7-14 I was in Florida visiting my uncle. We did some woodworking, watched the shuttle launch, went to the beach, and when I got back, the paint was dry. Finally!
I didn't do much work when I got back, because I had a gig that night, then a weekly acting camp that I nearly forgot about while laying around recovering, and then the very next day (Sunday), I was off to UNT for a jazz combo camp. Once I got home Friday, there wasn't much time, and the next day, I was off to the acting camp again, and then spent most of the rest of the day at Half-Price Books, and ended up with some good CDs. Monday I mainly recovered from jazz camp, and also went to the consultation to have my wisdom teeth pulled. Tuesday I finally dragged myself back out to the shop to try out the drill guide that I got, since my drill press isn't deep enough for all the holes in the control panel. I bought the Lee Valley guide, because I know that they usually have excellent quality, but this was terrible! There was so much play in it that it is nowhere near close to drill press accuracy, even a crummy one. I am sending it back, and after doing some research online, I am actually going with the Craftsman brand. It got the best reviews, so I figure it's more or less the lesser of x evils. Of course, this morning I had my wisdom teeth pulled, so I'm pretty much out of commission for at least a week. Luckily, thanks to the wonders of teh interwebs I can order the drill guide so it will be here and ready when I am.