A minor update on the cocktail cab today – everything is now primed and ready for painting. The legs have also been installed to make sure thing thing is actually level.
construction
All posts tagged construction
Some more progress on the fight stick.
First up was to get the top panel and support pieces together with some wood glue and screws. I also had to get the router out to make the start and select button holes shallower. The buttons I purchased for these were not very deep.
A little while ago, I was inspired by some work done by a fellow Aussie Arcade member on a series of fight sticks (Link).
After some planning and design, I thought I would try my hand at creating my own fight stick also.
First up was to decide on a button layout and size. I knew I wanted to have 8 player buttons, along with select, start and guide buttons since this is to work on a PS3 and Xbox360 console. I have gone with a top face size of 300 x 200mm. With the side panels added, this increases out slightly. With that decided on, and a button layout, I went about cutting the top panel to size, and cutting out the main player buttons and joystick hole.
Work on the cab has been a little slow of late. Lack of time, and at a stage where it’s mostly planning what next and how to achieve some things. But this weekend was very fruitful.
My first task was to get both control panels constructed and ready to attach to the cab (along with painting, applying artwork, etc). This was quite easy and just a copy of the first one.
I seem to have taken on too many projects of late (most outside arcade cabs), which has meant finishing my pac man cab and continuing on with the cocktail has slowed right down.
I did manage to get some time in the last week to move the cocktail forward, so here is the latest.
I turned my attention to the actual construction of the control panels. My first idea was to build it big enough to have the speaker grill on the front – just like you would see on the upright. This meant one of two things – the front of the control panel needed to be much bigger than necessary, or make the grill smaller. Neither of these two options appealed to me. The control face of the control panel is big enough as it is to support the artwork – it didn’t need to be any bigger to support a grill. Therefore, I have decided to move the grill to the lower left corner of the front and back panel. This means it will also appear on the P2 side, although it won’t have a speaker and will most likely just act as a passive vent.
Since I was not going to have the grill on the control panel, I went about drawing up measurements to ensure the buttons and wiring would fit and keep the rest of the panel compact as possible.
I have kept the white t-molding at the edge of the control face of the control panel and I wanted to have a rounded feel to the control panel edges. My first version of the control panel sides looked like this:
