The Player 1 Control Panel!!!
The final control panel for my arcade cabinet is complete! It is virtually identical to the Player 2 control panel with one big addition - a spinner! Here are the finished pictures from the top and underside:
This control panel is assembled in exactly the same way the Player 2 control panel was assembled except for the spinner. The first thing I did was cover the entire control panel with the vinyl that I purchased from Happs.
As you can see from these first two pictures, the vinyl comes on a roll with a backing that can be peeled away to reveal an adhesive. It really is as easy as cutting the vinyl a little oversized with a pair of scissors, peeling off the backing, applying the vinyl to the surface you want covered and then using a utility knife to trim the excess to the proper size. When you are finished, the control panel will look like this:
If you look hard enough you can see the depressions in the vinyl where the holes for the buttons and joystick are underneath. These holes will also get cut out using a utility knife although you don't have to be precise at all because the trim on the buttons will hide any imperfections in your cuts.
The installation of the buttons and joystick is self-explanatory but I want to go into a little detail about the spinner installation because it was a bit tricky and required some thought. I bought a SlikStik Tornado Spinner to use in my cabinet because it has an insanely long spin time and has been well received by the arcade building community. It is quite expensive and there are other much cheaper alternatives that work just as nicely but I figured a few extra dollars weren't going to kill me (since I've spent so much already). The spinner is pictured to the left (minus the knob). There are several knobs to choose from but all of them perform the same function. They are pictured below. I went with the skirted knob because I felt this would hide any imperfections between the control panel and the spinner itself.
The reason that this was a tricky installation was because I did not want anything showing above the control panel other than the knob (such as a carriage bolt which was used to mount the joystick - see the final picture below for an example). This meant that everything had to be mounted from underneath. The problem is that the spinner is meant to be mounted from above in a metal control panel. As you can see in the picture, there are 4 holes in the mounting bracket that are used to secure the spinner in place. Without something to screw into the spinner is typically assembled with a 4 carraige bolts and nuts.Here's where I got a bit creative... I decided to attach a small piece of plywood to the underside of the metal control panel to give me something to attach the spinner to. I cut a small 2" x 2" piece of plywood and drilled a hole in the middle (for the spinner shaft to pass through) and attached it to the control panel using Gorilla Glue. I wanted a strong bond and this stuff will work on just about any surface. As you can see in the blurry picture below (or maybe not), my homemade wood block is glued in place and ready for the spinner.
The only thing left to do now is install the spinner, joystick and buttons and this thing is finished! As you can see (again) from the picture of the underside of the completed Player 1 control panel, the spinner is attached to the wood block using 4 screws. This allows for a cleaner look on the top. That's all there is to it!
