Day 7 Finished Drawings

Just an hour again today, it is a work day after all.

Having drawn all the lines for where the wood will go for the marquee, control panel, monitor, etc (and therefore where to place the batons to hold the wood) on the first side of the cabinet, I meticulously wrote them all down for the plans.

With these numbers (and my other half matching almost exactly, but mirrored), I drew the lines on this.

Now, one way to check is to extend the lines fully across and line each half up beside each other and the lines should match exactly. This is what I mean, if you look closely you can see the lines matching. The first picture is a close up of the marquee, speaker and monitor.  The second is the control panel. The photos aren't great quality (done on my tablet) but they are just to show the meeting of the two cabinet sides).

On the second I artificially extended the lines to the edge of the board for this purpose of checking.

 It was here that I discovered that drawing by measuring isn't exactly perfect ;)

While the marquee matched perfectly, the control panel seemed out at the far edge (lucky I drew these lines really).
  
I guess it was just slightly off and exaggerated through the length of the line, but you don't really want a control panel that isn't straight.

To fix it (and really the proper way of doing it), is I marked on the edge of the originally drawn side, put both sides together and drew across with a T-square so that even if the cuts were out they would still line up squarely when put together.




This is what I mean, and with that job done, the next day I can screw on the batons (no glue yet). I'm planning on screwing from the inside and hope this is ok as normally you'd screw from the outside, but I'm hoping that given I'm gluing the batons and the screws are only a millimeter or two short it should be fine.

On reading, I'm thinking that really what I should have done is not bothered with the batons for the majority of the joins as the MDF is quite thick, and instead I should have just bought confirmat screws.








Apparently these have deeper threads making them idea for particle boards, as seen.

Today I got REALLY excited after browsing the internet for random arcade cabinet stuff ;)

I found that printing services are really quite cheap. At http://www.printed.com, a full colour side art on self-adhesive vinyl is only £25. The marquee on backlit paper, control panel and any other (kick-panel, etc) is about £15 each.

The only worry is whether I can put the sticky vinyl on as it looks quite hard and one crease and it's knackered. You can do it the 'wet' way (by using water spray so you can move the paper around and leave it to dry in it's own time) but people seem to not think highly of this approach. The other is just to get a normal poster printed in the same size and use some kind of contact spray glue.