Part 1 – 17/02/2026 –Design and making of the first panels
A while ago, I was given some arcade machine parts. This consisted of two original arcade boards and an arcade machine control panel. The boards were in need of repair, and the control panel needed a good cleanup. But the end goal was to build a cabinet that would eventually use these components if at all possible!
Doing a bit of a look around on the internet, I found an example of a cabinet that was using this control panel. It looked a bit different to the standard cabinet design with some nice angles on it, so I have decided to use this as my template and try to replicate this cabinet.
The first step was to work out some measurements and knock up a 3D model to make sure everything was going to fit together correctly. I always use SketchUp for this simply because it’s what I got used to and find it quite intuitive to use.
After this, I took one of the side views and exported it as a PDF. Using Adobe Reader, I then printed it out to scale across several sheets of A3 paper and taped them together to give me a template to transfer onto 18mm plywood.
Now that the template was transferred, I cut out the first side, smoothed all the corners and then clamped it onto the second sheet of plywood to get an exact copy. After cutting the second side out, I clamped them back together and once again sanded the round corners to make sure everything matched perfectly.
So that concludes the first part of this build. The next step will be to make some of the internal panels and turn this flat cabinet into a 3D object. If you want to keep up to date with this project, then subscribe to updates, and i’ll put out a notification whenever this project is updated!