Soldering Vent Part 2

Now that I'm back from college, I finally got time to finish my soldering vent. I started where I left off, which was wiring the whole thing up. I also had to glue the front on, so once I had everything going to the switch box, I glued, clamped, and while that dried, I finished wiring it up. It was all fairly simple, I just had to follow the directions. Once everything was wired up, I fastened the switch and box in place. I may have just done something wrong, but the holes for the switch didn't line with the holes in the switch box, so I just decided to use a 3/4" screw. It isn't the best I could have done, but it worked.

After that, I decided it was time to test it. I wasn't completely confident of my wiring job, so I put it in the middle of my driveway just to make sure. Well, nothing bad happened, and it worked, so I finished it up. This didn't require a whole lot, all I had to do was put the cover plate for the switch and vent on. For kicks, I also decided to add a handle to the top. This was one we just had laying around, but if I was to make this again, I would probably have taken the time to go to a hardware store, and tried to find something that I could have wrapped the power cord around.

 The finished product. I think it turned out quite well.

And now for something completely different:

All Monty Python references aside, I thought I would take a break from talking about the MAME cabinet and instead show a different thing I have been working on.
As I am sure you already know, and have for some time now, I am at college staying in a dorm. I have had different arrangements of my desk, and my current arrangement leaves my desk directly under the smoke detector. I plan to be soldering at my desk, and that produces smoke. Now I don't know if it would be enough to set it off or not, but I would just as soon not find out. With that in mind, I set out to make a solder filter. I had remembered seeing this instructable a long time ago. I went on the Home Depot website and started pricing out different fans, hoping for one with a square case. After a while, I found this bathroom vent, and decided to go with it. Once I got it home, I realized that it didn't have an AC plug, so I had to do some more work. I went back to Home Depot, and got a replacement power tool cable, along with a light switch, switch plate, and switch box. It was only after I got all that stuff that I realized that I would need a housing to put everything in. I started sketching out a design on paper, and once I had a satisfactory design, I put it into Sketchup.

My finished design

An idea of what it will look like finished

With it completely designed, it was off to my house to work on it over Thanksgiving break.
For this project, I decided to use plywood; I figured it would look good enough without doing anything to it. I bought some 3/4" plywood at the local Lowe's, but I couldn't find any satisfactory 1/2" plywood there. I decided to use my Baltic birch plywood that I had bought for a different project, but I can just buy more when I get back to that project. First I glued the two top pieces together; while those were drying, I cut the exhaust port holes in the side piece, and glued those together as well. Once everything was dry, I glued the frame together. Before I applied the glue, I realized it would be impossible to get the fan in there if I had the middle piece, so that's why you don't see it in the picture of the glueup.

I checked all the corners for squareness once everything was clamped and they still managed to get out of square. Ah well, you do what you can.
The back is inset in the frame, but when I didn't put the middle piece in, it made it impossibly difficult to position the back piece correctly. The quick fix for this is to glue a couple of support pieces to the inside, so the back won't fall in.

Unfortunately, I wasn't able to get much more done, and I didn't take any pictures, but not much more was done. Next time I go down there, I will probably be able to finish it, and I will take more pictures.

Slight Revamp to the Site

Nothing major going on, but I thought I might direct your attention to the new bar to your immediate up. If I have a major project going on that would take up more than a few posts, I will create a page so you can see all of them at once. My first example is obviously the MAME cabinet. Once I start doing other projects, if you want to read only about the MAME cabinet, you can just click on that button and only read about the MAME cabinet. Of course all those posts will still show up on the front page, they will just be with all of the others. Also up there is the obligatory "About Me" page.

What I Did Friday

So last Friday, after I was done with classes for the day, I drove back home to (finally!) work on the cabinet some more. On the way home, I stopped at Home Depot to buy a scraper.

Wrong tool for the job!

Once I brought it home, I started working, and I did have the foresight to use it in an inconspicuous spot. I'm glad I did, because it immediately started gouging the MDF. I tried other tools including a block plane and a card scraper. The block plane took strips of paint off the likes of which I have only seen from a finely tuned smoothing plane, but only for about five passes; after that it wouldn't do anything. The card scraper didn't do much of anything. I took the scraper back to HD, and bought the correct one, along with some CitriStrip (paint stripper made for acrylic latex paint), a plastic scraper (CitriStrip recommended it), and a set of painter's pyramids (actually tetrahedrons).
 Once I finally got back to the house, I got cracking!

I started out by trying a test spot in the inside of the cabinet, and applied it with a paper towel. After I did that, and that worked successfully, I started on the rest of the cabinet. For the first side, I used a paper towel; once I finished that side, I decided that the paper towel was too much work.

Swirls don't matter, but work does!

Once again, I went to HD and got a 4" paint brush. That worked a lot better, and sped up the process immensely.

Much better!

 I spent until midnight scraping paint off. I still wasn't done, but decided to wait until morning to finish it. I had a guitar lesson back in Denton at 1:00, so I had to finish it pretty quickly. I ended up getting up at 11:00, so I didn't have much time to finish it, but I did manage.

Mostly done. Also, the scraper.

This was a very nasty job, and I hope I never have to do it again. This is definitely a lesson that a job is worth doing correctly the first time, even if it is harder; because now, I have to do that same job that I didn't want to do, except this time after doing that same job I don't like.

Reconsidering Stripping

Although I am still at college, I still think about this project quite often. Right now, I am once again reconsidering stripping the paint, and I'll tell you why.
To start with, as soon as I put the first coat on, I wasn't very happy with it; as soon as it dried, it felt  rubbery, weak, like I could easily bring it back to the white primer by scratching it with my nails. I ignored this voice in my mind, and kept adding coats, until it was as black as it should be. It was soon after this that I had my wisdom teeth pulled. This kept me from hauling it upstairs, as I am sure you already well know. So there it has been sitting, in my shop, since then. I did put the t-molding on, and strangely enough, that seems to be the main thing holding me back from stripping the paint. I say it's strange because that has probably been the easiest part of this entire build. The other thing that has been keeping me at bay is probably the greatest asset of them all. And that is college. What I mean by that, is that if I do end up repainting, I will use an oil-based epoxy. This takes about 24 hours for each coat to cure, and I don't see why 168 hours (7*24) would be any worse. The implications of this would be that I could come home and apply one coat of paint once a week. By the time I am done with this semester of college, and am home for the winter, everything will be painted. And depending on how ambitious I am, maybe even upstairs in my room, or even totally completed; that sure would be cool!

In College

Obviously I haven't been posting lately. The reason for this is that I am now a college student, so the cabinet is a little far away to work on. There probably won't be very many updates, but if I am working on any sort of cool project I'll try to take some pictures and write something up for y'all.

Still Recovering...

Like the title says, I am still recovering from my wisdom teeth surgery, and they say no exercise, so I figure hauling a ~200 pound arcade cabinet into the house and up a flight of stairs would probably count as exercise, and not a good thing to do. I have been doing some mental work though. Besides trying to find a new HDTV for my dad, I have also been trying to figure out what is wrong with the TV I got for the cabinet, since it will turn off randomly only to be remedied by a nice bang on the side or top, which last time I checked isn't very good when playing games. I am also trying to figure out the best way to mount the trackball in the control panel. I think I am on to something, but will let you know when I make progress. Another thing which shouldn't be quite as hard is mounting the Ms. Pac-Man joystick. There is still a challenge though, as the shaft is very short. There is an arcade fairly close to my house that if I read their website correctly, has a replacement shaft for the controller, which should fit through the 3/4" material without any routing.