Initial woodwork, side panels an T-Molding

When doing my centipede cabined I had only a few disappointments, one being the T-Molding which was unbelievable stiff making it impossible to work with properly. I also found out that it is very difficult to make the slot into the wood ( I used MDF at the time .... ) for the T-Molding.

This time I wanted to avoid this. I bought 20mm wide T-Molding which I found immediately to be much better than the 16mm one I bought at a UK Arcade shop. Since I did not want to have the hassle of making the slot for the "T", I bought 8mm wood (no MDF) and 3mm wood for the inner layer. Using 2 pieces of 8mm and the slightly smaller 3mm in between gives me around 19 mm  -  Perfect for the T-Molding.

After sawing the 4 pieces of 8 mm wood (all in once "shot" to avoid differences), I did the 3mm pieces and clued them together. 

I could not await to start the T-Molding work even though it might be better to put on the sideart first and than to it. However, I started and found out that using clue and strong tape for fixing the already accomplished work (especially in the corners ) does the job very, very well. To bring on the tape I hold it in both hands, start on the T-Molding itself and than hold it very strong on both sides before attaching to the wood. This way, I finished the T-Molding for both sides in less than 1 hour. 

Sideart graphic

To say it upfront - I am not an expert in graphic design, in woodworking or in electronics. I am familiar with programming and have some basic skills here and there, however there are many other people doing Arcade projects of much more excellence than my work.

For the sideart, I decided to start with graphics I found in the web and created this one here ...

Picture shows the already printed sideart which a local shop did for me. I waited for the printouts to arrive before  I started the woodwork.

At the very beginning ...

Well, after I had build my Centipede Cabinet ( see http://tksarcadeproject.blogspot.de/ ) I was basically all set. Honestly, I use it pretty often as it is in our living room an German TV forces one one a frequent basis to look for alternatives than watching crap.
Since I would like to take my cabinet to parties with friends and be more flexible, I thought of building a bartop since a while. Now - a few weeks back - was the time to make it happen.

After a while of doing research, checking out Rasmus Koenigs excellent site at http://www.koenigs.dk/mame/eng/ and looking at hundreds of high-resolution pics at http://www.arcadeartwork.org I decided to build a Frogger Bartop based on PiMame / Raspberry.

To begin the show, I ordered some stuff ...

- a raspberry pi, mem card and power supply (50 Euro)
- female jumper cable to connect to the GPIO pins of the raspberry (5 Euro)
- a new Monitor for my PC (allowing to re-use the 10 year old 4:3 one in the Bartop)
- a cable to connect the old Monitor to the HDMI output of the raspberry (5 Euro)
- a small USB keyboard (10 Euro)
- LED strip for the backlit marquee (10 Euro)
- the sideart stickers based on own modified graphics ( 30 Euro )
- some Plexi (20 Euro)
- wood panels of course (40 Euro)
- 5 Meters of 20 mm wide T-Molding (25 Euro) (only 30 cm left after the build ... lucky me)
- buttons and Sanwa Joystick for the control panel (45 Euro)

(list to be updated later)