Cabinet Construction Day 1

It's been a week since my last post and there's been quite a bit of progress to report. It turns out the PC I originally intended to use isn't up to running Hyperspin but luckily I have a spare machine which is faster. So I connected up the hard drive and it performs much better:

Asus A7V400-MX motherboard

AMD Athlon XP 2600+, MMX, 3DNow, ~1.9GHz

1gb Ram

80gb Western Digital Hard Drive

So now I have both Mame0.147 with the Hiscore DIFF and Daphne up and running within Hyperspin. I've also added all of the EmuMovies for Hyperspin which looks fantastic. The more I use Hyperspin and get to know it, the more I realise just how powerful the software is; it can be a little tough getting started with it as there's so much to learn (if you're looking to customise it especially) but all the hard work really pays off in the end. I have some new things I'll be adding to Hyperspin too but more on that in the next post.

Earlier last week I took a trip down to B&Q and purchased the MDF for the cabinet construction. Typically bartop machines are built using ½" MDF (as opposed to ¾" MDF used for most upright cabinets) so I picked out the MDF Board (L)2440 x (W)1220 x (T)12MM.

Onto this (following my plans) I drew the first side panel in pencil. For the big curved line I used a piece of string around the pencil to draw an arc. 

Next the first side panel was cut with a jigsaw.

Using the cut out side panel as a template the second panel was drawn and cut out  Following this the rest of the parts were similarly drawn and cut out. All the other parts of the cabinet have straight edges, so to cut these we used a circular saw to get a straighter edge. When cutting out these parts it's best to draw one and then cut it rather than draw them all out at once and then cutting them. This is because when a cut is made a couple of mm (at least) will be lost due to the thickness of the blade and so the measurements will be off.

Next I did a little bit of sanding (with sandpaper rather than an electric sander) to the edging of the side panels. This is just to make the edges smoother but as I'll hopefully be applying T-Molding it isn't too important that this be perfect. Then I just did a quick once over with some rough sandpaper on the parts where paint will be applied as this will help the paint take to the wood better.

Now the cabinet is really starting to take shape!