Micro Cab: Let’s Build A Box!
The time has come to take the Micro Cab from design phase into actual form. Once again, I relied heavily on my friend Nhat and the shop tools he has in his garage, as well as his expertise in building things in the shape of a box. Way way back in the day, he used to work for a car stereo shop and built many a speaker box.
My frame of reference for the building building materials of the Micro Cab was to just copy whatever was done on an actual pinball machine. That meant using 3/4" plywood, right? Nhat shot that down in favor of MDF, as that would cut much smoother on his CNC machine.
The beauty of using the CNC machine is that now all the designing has been done, making more does not require any further measuring. It’s put the piece of wood down, tell it what you want cut, let it do it’s thing. A full set of panels for one box will take around 5 hours to complete.
Were I simply doing a one off build, I might have stuck with plywood and just drilled out the holes as needed. Since I’m planning on building more of these for any interested party, having to not measure out everything every time will greatly save on headaches and allow me to do it more efficiently. All the cuts and holes are within 1/1000th of an inch tolerance! With MDF I don’t have to worry about imperfections in the wood, and it costs less than the really good plywood we’d wanna use otherwise.
Next came assembly, which meant wood glue and a nail gun. Nothing to it really, though again in my head I had thought we’d be doing this with screws. I think I’ve built one too many pieces of IKEA shelving in the past.
Even with the precision of the CNC machine, I still had to sand areas where the wood met each other to make it super flush. Later at my own house, I applied wood filler to seal all the joints and fill the nail holes.
We did take a router to the top edge to knock off the sharp angles so as to make a much comfier experience for the hand. Nhat suggested using it on all the edges but I figured this wasn’t some deluxe piece of furniture, it’s a pinball cabinet. They didn’t exactly build ’em like that, and with a project like this you can really start to get lost in the fine details for absolutely no reason.
One of the mistakes I made when ordering parts was to get flipper buttons that were too short. They barely would have cleared the 3/4" of wood, meaning there was not enough to push on the switch. The solution was to cut 1/4" into the side panel. This meant that we couldn’t do what they do on an actual table with countersinking on the exterior and then having a narrow hole for the threads to come through, which are then captured by a specialty PAL nut (of which I didn’t order because I didn’t realize it didn’t come with the button!).
Here’s what the assembly looks like in my Firepower, and how close it comes to the ball plunger…
This will of course make things interesting for attaching the sensor disk for the plunger pull. I understand now why Jeremy Williams moved the plunger to a spot not normal to an actual machine, but we have a solution that I’ll reveal later. Here’s what it looks like, sorta, in my build…
After doing the test fitting of all the buttons, it’s time for paint! So far I’ve laid down primer and a few coats of the blue I chose. Sorry, saving those pics for another time!
I will show the legs and coin 3D printed coin door, which I used a rattle can of Krylon Hammered. This gives everything a slight texture, but most importantly hides all the nasty I couldn’t take care of on the legs. Over the next few days I’ll be painting on the white stripes and then outlining those with the black. That should be fun (not) to tape out and mask. Never done anything like that before. I should have made a stencil! Anyways, once that is done I get to tackle trying to put the BlahCade logo on the sides. I should also be heading back to Nhat’s to start soldering up the boards and get this wired up. Not saying it’ll be done by Thanksgiving, but it’ll be real soon around then!