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Title: Building a Bartop Arcade Cabinet Date: 2021-01-24 10:20 Category: Blog Tags: arcade Slug: bartop-arcade-cabinet-project-progress-1 Authors: Dave Pinkawa Summary: One of my pandemic projects is finally underway! Building a bartop arcade cabinet from an MDF template.
Initial Parts List
I don’t have the tools available (nor necessarily the time available currently) to create a bartop arcade cabinet from scratch. Thankfully, there are a few options online of CNC or cabinet shops that will mail you all of the pre-cut wood for assembly.
For this project I went with the LVL24 2 Player kit from https://store.lep1customs.com/. The only extra monitor I have on-hand is a 23” monitor, which comes out to about 22” wide. Because of this the only bartop model available from this vendor that would fit this big screen, is the LVL24.
There are some other shops on Etsy that have nice kits with already-finished MDF, but nothing that would fit this monitor size (And it is a squeeze), so LEP1 it was!
Other parts that I’m adding:
- Wood Glue (Holds the small wooden blocks to the frame)
- LVL24 2 Player Bartop Arcade Cabinet Kit
- 40ft Purple T-Molding from https://www.t-molding.com/https://www.t-molding.com/
- Black matte spray paint x2
- Clear enamel spray paint x1
- Old ASUS 23” 1080p monitor
- 22” wide x 4” tall plexiglass for marquee
- 20” wide x 12.5” tall plexiglass for covering the monitor area
- Raspberry Pi 4 Model B
- Black Carbon Fiber Car Wrap Vinyl (For the joystick area)
- Black Matte Car Wrap Vinyl (For the cabinet sides)
- 2 Ports Dual USB 3.0 Male to USB 3.0 Female
- EG STARTS 2 Player Arcade Games DIY Kit
- ARVICKA Computer Speaker, LED Accents USB Speaker
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The rest of this post is going to be entirely pictures of my current progress. It hasn’t gotten too far along, hoping to make some good progress in the coming weeks and have another post about it being completed!
The Box! It came! It came!
The parts all laid out and checked. It’s a very nice touch that all of the little banister pieces that get wood-glued down, are numbered and the respective numbers are also machined into the side-frame pieces. Makes for very easy to follow assembly (Except for #7, which is up to you to measure based on your monitor).
Bare cabinet but put together.
Have it fully together, not it was time to start painting. The vinyl I bought won’t adhere well to just plain MDF, so a combination of black spray paint and a final coat of Enamel hard-coat will provde the needed surface type (hopefully)
More to come!
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