It's pretty difficult to build a woodworking project without wood. On this page I talk about the various materials I used to build the cabinet.
When building any woodworking project, be it an heirloom piece of furniture to a set of utility shelves, one of the basic decisions that have to be made is what materials to use. Obviously, being a hobby woodworker my first choice for a project like this is to use wood. Beyond that, however, there were a lot of different options I had to choose from.
For sure I wanted to use 3/4" thick material (well, 3/4" plywood is actually 11/16" thick but that's close enough.) I wanted the sturdiness of the thicker material, and given that I was going to use pocket screws for much of the construction it gives me a little more wood to work with.
While it would be possible to build the entire cabinet out of solid wood, this wasn't a desirable option for me. I was planning on painting the cabinet, and given the sheer amount of material needed it wouldn't have been cost effective to use solid wood when I was just going to paint the project. So that left me with engineered sheet materials from which to choose.
Many of the original arcade machines were made out of particle board. This material is also sometimes called "chipboard" because it's made out of tiny wood chips mixed with a resin (glue) and pressed into sheets. The positives of particle board is that it's relatively inexpensive, and tends to be very flat. The negatives are that it's heavy, absorbs moisture easily, tends to be fragile and doesn't hold screws very well. Even though this is the classic arcade cabinet material, I opted to not use it because I felt the negatives outweigh the positives.
Another option I briefly considered was melamine. This is very similar to particle board, however the two outside faces are covered in a thin, durable plastic laminate. This gives a very nice surface on the material faces and saves the need for finishing (painting), although because it is plastic it does require a special glue if you want to attach boards to the laminate surface. It is more expensive than regular particle board. It shares many of the same downsides as particle board, but I must admit that I really like how it looks. If my local home center carried it in-stock in black I may very well have gone this route. It was going to be a custom order to get it in non-white colors, so I decided to go a different route.
Many people build their arcade cabinet out of MDF (medium density fiberboard.) MDF is similar to particle board in the way it's made, but whereas particle board uses small wood chips, MDF uses even smaller wood chips, almost to the point of sawdust. The result is an extremely dense, but perfectly flat sheet of material. The surface has no grain or pronounced texture, which means it takes paint very well. Like particle board, it tends to absorb moisture and doesn't hold screws well. The dust from cutting/machining it is pretty nasty stuff, so you don't want to breathe it. The biggest downside, however, is the weight. A 4x8 sheet of MDF weighs about 100 pounds. Given that my cabinet design calls for three 4x8 sheets of material, that was going to put my cabinet well over 300 pounds. That's brutally heavy. Mainly because of the weight I opted not to use MDF.
Next on the list is MDO (medium density overlay). This is traditional hardwood plywood, but the front and back faces have a very thin layer of a material similar to MDF. The result is a material that has most of the benefits of MDF (flat, smooth surface, easy to paint) and also the benefits of plywood (moisture resistant, holds screws better.) The only real downside to MDO is the price. It's about the most expensive sheet good at the home center. I had decided to suck it up and pay the premium price when I made the trip to the home center, but before I loaded my cart with MDO sheets I decided to look around at the remaining material options.
Plywood comes in a lot of variations. Everything from construction grade BCX material, to fancy hardwood faced material suitable for fine woodworking. I certainly didn't want to use construction grade plywood. This stuff tends to warp, and has surface faces full of knots and voids. Lots of sanding and filling would have to be done to make this stuff usable, and even then it would be hard to hide the fact that I tried to save a few bucks.
On the other end of the spectrum is the nice plywood with one or two "money faces" of oak, maple or cherry. Being that I was going to paint this project it would be a shame to buy this fancy plywood and then use paint to cover up the wood that dictates the premium price.
As I looked around for what was available between these two extremes, I noticed my home center had poplar plywood. Poplar has a nice smooth surface for painting, but doesn't have a fancy grain that makes you feel guilty about painting it. It was a more reasonable 70 lbs per sheet. Best of all, it was on sale for about 1/2 the price of MDO. I came home with three sheets of this poplar plywood.
One of the features of this plywood was that one side was pre-sprayed with a sealer. This didn't really matter to me as I was going to finish and paint both sides of all the pieces. The big thing you'll notice in the construction pictures is that when that sealed face is showing it has a much browner hue to it versus the back sides.
I did opt to use MDF for one portion of the cabinet: the monitor bezel. The reason I decided to go with MDF for this piece was because I wanted to put a 45° chamfer on the inside of the bezel edge surrounding the screen. Given that plywood is made from layers of wood glued together, it makes areas where the edge is visible difficult to hide. Because the monitor is the section of the cabinet you stare at more than any other part of the unit, I didn't want the layers of plywood to jump out at me. So I conceded the use of MDF for the bezel. I had enough scrap material sitting around the shop that I didn't have to buy any MDF to make the bezel.
I could have used the 3/4" thick plywood for the storage drawers. I happened to have some 1/2" plywood left over from another project, and decided it would work fine for the drawers. Plus, the thinner material would make the usable drawer space a little larger.
The bottom of the drawers are 1/8" hardboard, which is a pretty typical material for drawer bottoms. It doesn't weigh much, it doesn't eat up drawer depth and is surprisingly strong for how thin it is.
While I'm using a modern flat-panel LED computer monitor, I didn't want this fact to be obvious when looking at the cabinet, so I took two steps. One of the ways I'm hiding the monitor is surrounding it with a wood bezel. The other way is to put a clear "glass" on top of the bezel.
I had two material options for this screen on top of the screen.
The most obvious choice would be to use a pane of real glass. I would want to use 1/8" thick double strength glass just so breakage wasn't a big concern. There were three main downsides to using glass. First, glass is heavy. This cabinet is going to weigh over 200 lbs. A big sheet of glass could easily add an additional 5 lbs of weight. Not a ton, but when I'm trying to muscle this cabinet up the stairs from the basement I'm going to want to save some weight wherever possible.
Second, is price. Having a sheet of glass cut can be expensive.
Third, is clarity. I read about people buying a sheet of glass for their arcade project, and once it's in front of the monitor it becomes apparent that it's not quite crystal clear. There's often splotchy "rainbowish" patterns in the glass that appear during certain lighting and viewing angles. One can pay a premium for extra clear glass, but that goes back to the previous downside.
So, I decided to go with acrylic (aka plexiglass.) It is inexpensive. It is light. It is perfectly clear. It is resistant to breakage. It is easily available at my local home center. It is simple to trim it to size right in my shop.
Sounds perfect, right? Well, not exactly. It does have the reputation of being easy to scratch. I will have to take care not to rub things against the screen. Also, apparently you should only dust it with a microfiber towel, and should never use a cleaner with a paper towel. Also you don't want to use windex or other common household cleaners on it. I bought a bottle of Novus Plastic Polish that is specifically designed to clean plexiglass.
The good news is should my acrylic screen get scratched, it is simple and inexpensive to replace it. Or, if I decide that acrylic isn't working out I can always switch to glass down the road.
There were lots of other materials I needed to purchase. I'm not going to try to remember or list them all, but here are a few of them so you get the idea:
T-Molding - This is the protective plastic edge used on arcade game cabinets. It hides the unsightly edge of engineered wood panels such as particleboard and plywood. It has been used so much in historical arcade game construction that machines almost look wrong without it. It also provides an accent color to the cabinet. In my case I used white T-molding, but the stuff is available in a whole slew of colors.
Wire - There would be a ton of wiring with this cabinet. Obviously, wiring required wire. I purchased some spools of 24 gauge stranded wire in various colors. The spools each held 30 feet of wire, but in retrospect I should have purchased longer lengths as I ran out of wire in a couple of the colors.
Cable Clips - In an effort to keep all that wiring from becoming a jumbled mess, I purchased cable clips in various sizes and styles. Here are the large clips that I used. All of the kinds of clips I purchased had adhesive backs to allow me to stick them on the cabinet wherever I needed some organization.
Drywall Mud - Ok, this seems like a strange thing to put on an arcade cabinet material list, but I used a lot of it. The poplar plywood I used had visible grain. If I were to paint the wood directly, this grain would have been very noticeable. To my eye, grain texture peeking through a top finish on a woodworking project is what makes things look "obviously homemade." For a professional looking job, I like to use grain filler. And for a project that will get painted an opaque color, drywall mud is about the easiest grain filler to use. You just spread it on, working it into the wood pores, then let it dry and easily sand it off. Sometimes you may have to do a second coat, but most of the time one coat will do. You wouldn't want to use drywall mud on wood where you're going to use a translucent finish, but for an opaque finish it works well.
Paint - I considered a few different paint options. Spray paint probably would have provided the best finish, but I was having a hard time finding the right shade of blue that I wanted. In addition, I prefer to spray paint outdoors, and lugging a 200 pound cabinet outside to paint it, then lugging it back downstairs into the shop didn't seem very appealing. I decided to go with standard water-based latex paint applied with brushes and rollers. To try to reduce brush and roller marks I added some Floetrol to the paint can. I also didn't buy the cheapest paint at the home center, but paid a few bucks extra to get quality paint and primer.
Aluminum L Channel - I used aluminum L channel as the top and bottom pieces that hold the marquee in place. This material is perfectly straight, strong and thin, so it worked well for this situation rather than trying to use wood. Also, if I were to try and make these pieces out of wood, the end grain would be visible which would require lots of filling and sanding to hide. The aluminum was very smooth and just needed to be painted.
Vinyl - The control panels were going to be a heavy-touch area. Just painting them probably wouldn't be very durable for the long-term. I bought a couple yards of black vinyl material to be used to cover the control panels rather than using paint on these pieces.
ABS Plastic - The audio amplifier I purchased came as a circuit board with some knobs on the front. I wanted something that looked a little nicer to the user. However, there wasn't much room between the knobs and the potentiometer bodies for a thick piece of wood. I dug around in my scrap pile and found a piece of ABS plastic that I normally use to make guitar pickguards. It was thin and strong, so it was perfect to use to make a bezel for the audio amplifier.
Metal Foil Tape - Also known as "real" duct tape. This isn't the crappy plastic tape used for temporary redneck fixes. This is the stuff used by HVAC installers to seal ductwork joints. It is actually made of metal, and is even conductive. For the cabinet, I used it to line the marquee light cavity. I did this because the metal is reflective, and this would shine more of the light out of the front of the marquee.
Wood Dowels - The modular control panels are held in place by wood dowels. These aren't anything too special. I purchased a bag of inch long 1/4" diameter dowels at the home center for a couple of bucks. They're meant for wood joinery, but work fine for this purpose.
Wood Shims - After the monitor bezel and plexiglass was slid into place, I noticed it wasn't as tight as I would like it to be against the front of the groove it sits in. The groove was intentionally cut slightly wider than needed so there was some wiggle room to allow things to slide into position without too much resistance. To hold the bezel and glass tight against the front, I put some thin shims into the back side of the channel to take up the extra space. These are the same kind of wood shims you buy for installing a door or a window in a house. I cut them down to about 2" long. They can be easily pulled out if I need to remove the monitor for maintenance.
Glue - Various glues were used throughout the project. Most of the time I used regular Titebond (PVA) glue. It's plenty strong, has a good working time, is inexpensive and easy to clean. I also occasionally used CA glue (superglue), most notably to seal the vinyl edges around the control panels. 3M spray adhesive was used to affix the vinyl to the wood panels. Lastly, I used slow-set epoxy to fix a few boo-boos I made in the wood panels. Epoxy has good gap filling properties so it's useful to repair woodworking accidents.
Of course, materials aren't all you need to build an arcade cabinet. Click here to read about the hardware I used.
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This page last updated on 09/21/2023