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The Smoothcade


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So I designed and built an arcade cabinet, the case construction is mainly ultralight m.d.f. with plywood, in a dado construction with support cleats, No exposed fasteners, and No sharp corners. It houses a 32" sony flatscreen tube television off craigslist, and 4 players functionality. The treatment for the paintjob on the wood was first a penetrating wood epoxy, (mdf is like a sponge, this makes it tough and not soft), then assembly,

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then bondo for the curved back and front,

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high build primer,

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sealer,

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silver base, colored base, pearlcoat,

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clearcoat. After it was all cleared the first time I was not happy so I added some graphics to it.

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Tried to go a little retro, but still somewhat presentable today, as to not make it a horrid 80's paintjob. Overall I think it turned out pretty good. I will try to update when more finished.......

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That's good stuff!! I wish I would have built my own cabinet, but I actually got an old Tekken 3 showcase cabinet for a great price so all i had to do was add the computer.

You have a nice garage there! I think that's the key to a lot of this stuff....having the proper tools and workspace so you can focus one getting your work done.

Great job...be sure to post some more picks once it's finished!!

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The resin top is a product called 3form, I work in a cabinet/store fixture shop as a cad drafter, we had this scrap laying around for about 2 years, me and my co-worker always wanted to do something with it and finally I had an idea.

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Anyhow that scrap prolly cost around 700$ It was free to me, I then sent it down to the cnc shop and had him bore out the back to a respectable thickness, You wouldn't want to cut this stuff with a handheld router, Then I backpainted the material, (it already was backpainted white), then used a roundover around the controls and backpainted those areas to match the controller color. His cnc does not do any roundovers, just square cuts.

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As far as the curved back that was done with 1/8" masonite.... it was hard and I only got about 2-3 layers on, the radius was to short, about 6", then I cut the masonite into 3/4" strips and filled in the low spots I had, then used fibertech, then bodyfiller to block out the surface. The really simple way however is to buy from the lumberyard Italian bending poplar (wuapop)sp? that stuff is super bendable, to about 6" diameter and comes in 1/8" thickness, it was just too much money for me, I tried to stay on a budget, but either method will standup to time and look great.

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  • 4 years later...

IMAG1174.jpg

that's a sneak peak showing the difference between the new ggg helio9 and there rgb drive II lighting units. the helio9 is far superior in my opinion. Its hard to see the difference though in these pictures, but the helio's will end up lighting up the entire control panel, similar to whats happening with that big button in the center.

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  • 3 weeks later...

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